Canopy Cover Estimation from Landsat Images: Understory Impact onTop-of-canopy Reflectance in a Northern Hardwood Forest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In northern hardwood forests, light availability is considered to be the main factor limiting seedling and sapling growth. However, field measurement of this variable is time-consuming. To address this issue, we developed random forest regression models to estimate canopy cover from a Landsat 8 OLI image of a northern hardwood forest in northwestern New Brunswick, Canada. We then assessed the accuracy of model predictions with a canopy height model (CHM) derived from LiDAR data. We selected 2 threshold heights (1.3 and 5 m) to distinguish the understory from the overstory and to determine the impact of the understory on top-of-canopy reflectance. Our results show that the understory influenced top-of-canopy reflectance and that a 1.3 m height threshold provided the most accurate estimation of canopy cover. In contrast with studies conducted in softwood stands, we found no evidence that the shortwave infrared (SWIR1) band decreased the influence of the understory on top-of-canopy reflectance. In northern hardwood forests, the estimation of canopy characteristics, such as canopy cover and leaf area index, should be focused on the green band, as it was least influenced by understory vegetation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".