Application of Compound Terrain Factor LSW in Vegetation Cover Evaluation

Abstract

Aiming at the limited degree of revealing vegetation growth pattern by simple topographic factors, it is essential to find an index that can explain the vegetation cover mechanism to a greater extent. By introducing a certainty factor into vegetation cover evaluation, LSW, LS, topographic wetness index, and aspect were also chosen to carry out control group experiments. The grid digital elevation model of 10 disaster-stricken counties (cities) in Sichuan Province was used as the basis to obtain LSW, while vegetation susceptibility levels were categorized using the natural breaks classification. The results of the multi-factor analysis demonstrated that the certainty factor corresponding to LSW climbed linearly from negative to positive values as the susceptibility level rose, indicating that it was highly correlated with vegetation cover and had an obvious advantage in revealing the vegetation growth potential. Statistically, the vegetation occurrence rate increased regularly with the improvement of the susceptibility level, in which the high and very high susceptibility zones corresponded to 83.66% and 89.95% of vegetation coverage respectively, suggesting a good consistency between the delineated high susceptibility areas and the actual vegetation cover. The findings proved that LSW has a substantial advantage in evaluating vegetation cover, with an evaluation model accuracy of 72.9%. It has been established that LSW will serve as a promising new model for assessing vegetation restoration and planning.

Keywords

• vegetation growth potential
• digital terrain analysis
• LSW factor
• certainty factor