Potential of the kNN Method for Estimation and Monitoring off-Reserve Forest Resources in Ghana

Dramatic price increases of fossil fuels and the economic development of emerging nations accelerates the transformation of forest lands into monocultures, e.g. for biofuel production. On this account, cost efficient methods to enable the monitoring of land resources has become a vital ambition. The application of remote sensing techniques has become an integral part of forest attribute estimation and mapping. The aim of this study was to evaluate the potentials of the kNN method by combining terrestrial with remotely sensed data for the development of a pixel-based monitoring system for the small scaled mosaic of different land use types of the off-reserve forests of the Goaso forest district in Ghana, West Africa. For this reason, occurrence and distribution of land use types like cocoa and non-timber forest resources, such as bamboo and raphia palms, were estimated, applying the kNN method to ASTER satellite data. Averaged overall accuracies, ranging from 79% for plantain, to 83% for oil palms, were found for single-attribute classifications, whereas a multi-attribute approach showed overall accuracies of up to 70%. Values of k between 3 and 6 seem appropriate for mapping bamboo. Optimisation of spectral bands improves results considerably.