A new strategy for vegetation mapping with the aid of Landsat MSS data

Vegetation classification and mapping includes the following stages: stratification, sampling and classification followed by refinement and mapping. Stratification with the aid of aerial photography can often be the most subjective and, particularly when large areas are to be covered, the most time consuming stage. The new strategy using scale-related vegetation-enhanced Landsat MSS imagery facilitates more objective and faster stratification as well as further refinement. This imagery is obtained by a combination of principal component analysis, median filtering and colour space transformation. In this strategy all the individual stages have been simplified and can therefore be executed by technical staff, leaving the highly trained botanist more time for the interpretation of the results.