The temperate savanna in Northeastern China (2022)

Temperate savanna shares a wide geographical distribution. It plays a crucial role in supporting a substantial portion of rangelands and livestock, thereby contributing significantly to human livelihoods. The purpose of this study is to develop a new temperate savanna identification method for mapping the temperate savanna in Northeastern Chinawithin a minimum identifiable area of 0.5 ha by integrating Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) imagery with high-resolution satellite imagery of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 by using Random Forest regression and Classification and Regression Tree algorithms. The training and validation datasetswere collected from UAV imagery coveringthe ground area of 50 square kilometers with the training data of 104,756. The proposed method achieved with the overall accuracy of 0.82 and Kappa coefficient of 0.63 for savanna identification.Temperate savanna in Northeastern China covering a total area of 156,000 square kilometers.This map enhances our understanding of the spatial extent and area of temperate savanna. The derived method provides a new insight to explore the extent of regional and global savannain the future.