Monitoring of the archive and forest seed orchards’ condition using high resolution Pleiades satellite data

Abstract

Thousands of hectares of forest seed orchards and archival uterine plantations of plus trees have been created in the Russian Federation. Their inventory and monitoring can be carried out using ultra-high resolution satellite imagery. The purpose of the work was to test this approach based on Pleiades 1A data, optimal in terms of price/quality ratio, for inventory and assessment of the state of archival plantations and forest seed orchards of conifers, concentrated on an area of about 200 hectares of the joint stock comp. Berdskiy forestry enterprise breeding nursery (Iskitimskiy district of the Novosibirsk Oblast). The inventory was carried out on the basis of visual interpretation of the synthesized multispectral images with increased resolution due to the panchromatic channel, taking into account passport and other data on the territory of the nursery. To control the results of visual decoding, a selective field inventory was carried out. The brightness of the pixels of the initial multispectral image in the central parts of the crowns of various trees and plantation areas not covered by crowns is compared. The results obtained illustrate the possibility of identifying healthy trees of cultivated species, as well as fallen and replaced by deciduous self-seeding trees. The described approach can be used for operational remote monitoring of archival plantations and forest seed orchards of conifers.

Keywords

• inventory
• breeding and seed growing objects of coniferous species
• pleiades satellite scenes
• visual decoding