WPE01 Assessing the value added of NEON for using machine learning to quantify vegetation mosaics and woody plant encroachment at Konza Prairie

Woody encroachment, or invasion of woody plants, is rapidly shifting tallgrass prairie into shrub and evergreen dominated ecosystems, mainly due to exclusion of fire. Tracking the pace and extent of woody encroachment is difficult because shrubs and small trees are much smaller than the coarse resolution (>10m2) of common remote sensed images. However, the US government has been investing in finer resolution (<2m2) remote sensing through USDA NAIP and the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), both of which cost multi-million dollars each year and contain different remote sensed products. We compared two methods of classification (random forests and support vector machines) with these two freely available remotely sensed aerial images to determine if and how much NEON adds to classification accuracy and determine which method of machine learning was more accurate. All models have very high overall classification accuracy (>91%), with the NEON image a few percent more accurate than NAIP. The NEON image significantly relies on canopy height (LiDAR) to make classifications, but the importance of bands is more evenly distributed during NAIP classification. Lastly, accuracy for Eastern Red Cedar specifically is high with NEON (78-84%), compared to the relatively low classification accuracy using NAIP imagery (55-61%).