Tree species mapping with Airborne hyper-spectral MIVIS data: the Ticino Park study case

The present work describes the procedure, which was studied for mapping the spatial distribution of tree forest communities in the Ticino Park located in Northern Italy. Ten overlapping airborne runs of the Multispectral Infrared Visible Imaging Spectrometer (MIVIS) were acquired to cover the entire park extent (920 km2). An integrated supervised classification procedure was developed using band ratios in the red edge portion (REP) of the spectrum and training collected by field survey and visual interpretation. Validation performed with a robust random stratified sampling scheme and taking into account the unequal distribution of the classes showed that, on large-scale application, high-resolution remotely sensed images can generate, in a cost-effective manner, accurate (overall accuracy 75%) local-scale thematic products.