Assessing mangrove deforestation using pixel-based image: a machine learning approach

Abstract

Mangrove is one of the most productive global forest ecosystems and unique in linking terrestrial and marine environment. This study aims to clarify and understand artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in remote sensing mangrove forests. The performance of machine learning algorithms such as random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), decision tree (DT), and object-based nearest neighbors (NN) algorithms were used in this study to automatically classify mangrove forests using orthophotography and applying an object-based approach to examine three features (tree cover loss, above-ground carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, and above-ground biomass loss). SVM with a radial basis function was used to classify the remainder of the images, resulting in an overall accuracy of 96.83%. Precision and recall reached 93.33 and 96%, respectively. RF performed better than other algorithms where there is no orthophotography.