COMPARING DIFFERENT MACHINE LEARNING OPTIONS TO MAP BARK BEETLE INFESTATIONS IN CROATIA

Abstract

This paper presents different approaches to map bark beetle infested forests in Croatia. Bark beetle infestation presents threat to forest ecosystems. Due to large unapproachable area, it also presents difficulties in mapping infested areas. This paper analyses available machine learning options in open-source software QGIS and SAGA GIS. All options are performed on Copernicus data, Sentinel 2 satellite imagery. Machine learning and classification options are maximum likelihood classifier, minimum distance, artificial neural network, decision tree, K Nearest Neighbor, random forest, support vector machine, spectral angle mapper and Normal Bayes. Kappa values respectively are: 0.71; 0.72; 0.81; 0.68; 0.69; 0.75; 0.26; 0.60; 0.41 which shows highest classification accuracy for artificial neural networks method and lowest for support vector machine accuracy.