1. Forestry Department, Faculty of Natural Resources
Statistical analysis of satellite remote sensing data for forest inventory and mapping in north of Iran
S. A. Bonyad
Forestry Department, Faculty of Natural Resources
Guilan University, Guilan, Rasht, Iran.
Tel: Fax: -

2. 1. Introduction
 The objectives of forest inventory are:
To define the geographical location of forests
To map the forest stands
To stratify the forest
To estimate forest stand parameters
To produce reliable information for forest management
To assign probability to forest maps

3. Remote sensing data for forest inventory has two options:
Aerial photos
Satellite imagery

4. Main satellite image data sources for forest inventory :
Landsat TM with 7 bands +Pan
Landsat ETM+ with 7 bands +Pan
IRS Liss3
SPOT, Multispectral and 1 Panchromatic bands,

5. Forest inventory requirements:
Remotely sensed data
forest stands and
A suitable classification technique

6. 2. Materials and Methods Study area
The natural forest stands of Zanjan province were selected as the study area.
Satellite image database.
Landsat ETM m 6 bands
Landsat Pan m 1 band

7. Data Analysis Methods Statistical ANOVA and MANOVA techniques:
 Wilks’ test
 Hotelling’s T2
 Principal Components Analysis (PCA)
Factor Analysis
Also:
Vegetation index : DVI , NDVI ,…
Maximum liklelihood classification (MLC) technique

8. 3. Results. The preliminary and PCA results are presented in Table 1 and 2 respectively. Correlated data

9. Uncorrelated PCA data

10. PCA eigen-channels

11. Vegetation index for forest inventory
Followings Vegetation index were used for forest inventory

12. Raster GIS
A RGIS file created contained 18 image layers for forest inventory analysis :

13. KIA
RGB bands combination

14. Figure 2. Forest inventory map for Forest stands
50km

15. Classification results

16. 4. Conclusions
The PCA eigen-channels, Vegetation index, Factor Analysis are useful for forest inventory, classification and mapping.
The statistical multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) techniques are useful to map the forest stands and to estimate stand parameters.

17. Thank you