Poplar Tree Index (PTI): A New Vegetation Index for Monitoring Poplar Cultivated Areas

The issue of accurate identification of the Earth's surface features from the very high spatial resolution (VHSR) satellite imagery has been a major area of interest within the field of remote sensing. Vegetation indices obtained from the remotely sensed imagery have long been used as a simple but effective tool for quantitative and qualitative identification of land surface materials. In this study, a new vegetation index called Poplar Tree Index (PTI) was introduced for the identification of poplar (Populus) tree cultivated field from the WorldView-3 imagery having unique features including 31cm panchromatic resolution and super-spectral resolutions. To test its capability in distinguishing poplar cultivated fields from the other cultivated fields, four well-known vegetation indices were also utilized, and their performances were quantitatively analyzed based on the separability measures (i.e., Bhattacharyya Distance and M-Statistic). Results revealed that the use of PTI significantly increased the discrimination level of pixels representing poplar planted areas from maize and hazelnuts.