On the usefulness of very high resolution IKONOS satellite imagery for vegetation mapping

Abstract

Traditional vegetation mapping methodologies consist primarily of field surveying and mapping from aerial photographs or high resolution satellite images. Previous applications of satellite imagery for this task (e.g. Landsat TM and SPOT HRV) have not always been successful, as such imagery proved to have limited spatial resolution. Since 2000 a number of very high resolution commercial satellites have been launched (e.g. IKONOS, Quickbird and to some extent SPOT 5), typically producing images with a spatial resolution of 4-5 meters in multispectral mode (3-4 bands in the visible – near-infrared range) and 1 meter in panchromatic mode. 2 to 0.5 m spatial resolution imagery is expected to be available in the next few years. These new datasets open up new potentials for detailed vegetation mapping. The usefulness of very high resolution multispectral satellite images is demonstrated through examples of on-going projects at the School of Surveying (University of Otago).