Murgia Alta: Ailantus altissima invasive species presence map (2012)

An Ailanthus altissima invasive species presence map in "Murgia Alta" PA, for 2012, obtained by a two stage algorithm [1]. The first stage considers the deciduous vegetation layer obtained by a multiclass knowledge-based classification of 4 multi-seasonal VHR Worldview-2 images. In the second stage an SVM classifier was used to detect, in a two-classes problem, the Ailanthus invasive species within the deciduous layer vegetation boundaries overimposed on 2 VHR Worldview-2 images. The Worldview-2 images were dated May 19th, 2011, October 10th, 2011, January 22th, 2012 and July 6th, 2012. The October and July images were considered in the second stage.

The map was produced at 2 meters spatial resolution and projected in WGS84/UTM33N.

The map has binary values where value 1 indicates Ailanthus altissima pixels whereas value 0 indicates No Ailanthus altissima.

The Overall Accuracy (OA) of the map was: OA=97.96%±0.14%.

[1] C. Tarantino, F. Casella, M. Adamo, R. Lucas, C. Beierkuhnlein, P. Blonda. (2018). “Ailanthus altissima mapping from multi-temporal very high resolution satellite images”, ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 147, 90-103, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2018.11.013