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 19^th, 2011, October 10^th, 2011, January 22th, 2012 and July 6^th, 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