研究目的

The first goal of this project was to develop a mapping method to report on forest stand status, site productivity, and resilience for a vast area of northern Quebec (680 000 km2). Reporting the forest stand status of the northern lands involves assessing the dominant tree species, forest cover type, understory type, stand cover, tree height and age, and the open land type (i.e., nonforest land cover). The method aimed at providing the same level of information that is available for southern forests in Canada. Site resilience of the northern ecosystems depends largely upon site productivity, which is linked with surficial deposits, and forest fires that occurred in the last century.

研究成果

The methods that were developed in this project introduced several technological innovations. The method proposed provides the means for mapping very large areas of forested ecosystems at regular intervals with accuracies comparable to current inventory requirements. This cost-effective and innovative method proposes new ways to map boreal ecosystems.

研究不足

Despite being applied to a huge area (44% of the Quebec Province), it is still unknown as to how well the method can be adapted to the rest of the boreal region, particularly where different inventory practices exist. The proposed method requires a priori calibration data to obtain a suitable level of detail and accuracy: archived aerial photographs or maps, aircraft surveys, or field studies. The surficial deposit maps that were produced from 3-D anaglyph mosaic were rendered at a coarser scale than the vegetation map, resulting in a much coarser minimal mapping unit. The validation approach using an airborne camera is limited to the validation of all map attributes that do not require 3-D information.