Determination of Adult Poplar Plantation Area in Mazandaran Province using Santinel 2 Satellite Images

Estimating the amount of wood produced in poplar plantations is not possible without determining the area of poplar plants. Estimating the amount of wood produced is very important for the production management of wood industry units. Industry owners need to know how much poplar wood can be extracted in the coming years. Therefore, identifying areas of poplar cultivation in Mazandaran province is one of the main objectives of the present study.

This study was conducted to estimate adult poplar cultivations area using Sentinel2 satellite in Mazandaran Province. Firstly, the general survey carried out on poplar cultivation with full canopy distribution and its cultivation area at the regarding area. Then, in the whole area, the numbers of 202 cultivated areas have randomly been mapped using Global Positioning System (GPS) as Training Samples. In the next step, the relevant images have been identified in term of time and downloaded, and also radiometric, atmospheric, and geometric corrections have been done on them. Also, banding appearance, color compositions, images mosaicking and bands calculations have been performed. The Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm has been used in order to extract poplar cultivation in the growth period of 2018 (March to December). Evaluation of the accuracy of the classification results of the generated maps was performed using 183 ground trust points via GPS.

The results showed that in 2018, 705 hectares of Mazandaran area are under poplar plantations, which Mahmoudabad and Neka cities with an area of 167 hectares and 33 hectares, respectively, had the highest and lowest area of poplar cultivation. Poplar cultivation area estimated in this study was excluding young poplar stands. Furthermore, the results of the accuracy assessment demonstrated that the overall accuracy is 95.35. The average area of poplar stands was 800 square meters. But the number of stands less than 500 square meters (7121 plots) includes more than 80% of the stands. Only 0.2% of the total stands (57 stands) make up more than one hectare. These 57 stands occupied about half of the province's poplar plantations.

Despite the favorable climatic conditions in Mazandaran province, the area of poplar cultivations was lower than expected. Therefore, it is suggested that in the future, the necessary measures should be taken to meet the wooden needs of Mazandaran province through wood farming.