Random Forest Classification of Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) Using Sentinel-2 Data - A Case Study of Czechia
Abstract
Land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) is a greenhouse gas inventory sector that evaluates greenhouse gas changes in the atmosphere from land use and land-use change. This study focuses on the development of a Sentinel-2 data classification according to the LULUCF requirements on the cloud-based platform Google Earth Engine (GEE).
The methods are tested in selected larger territorial regions (two Czech NUTS 2 units) using data collected in 2018. The Random Forest method was used for classification.
In terms of classification accuracy, a combination of these parameters was tested: The Number of Trees (NT), the Variables per Split (VPS) and the Bag Fraction (BF). A total of 450 combinations of different parameters were tested.
The highest accuracy classification with an overall accuracy = 89.1% and Cohen's Kappa = 0.84 had the following combination: NT = 150, VPS = 3 and BF = 0.1. For classification purposes, a mosaic was created using the median method.
The resulting mosaic consisted of all Sentinel-2 bands in 10 and 20 m spatial resolution. Altitude values derived from SRTM and NDVI variance values were also included in the classification.
These added bands were the most significant in terms of Gini importance.