Differentiation of selected Australian woodland species using CASI data

The potential use of Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imager (CASI II) data for discriminating woodland tree species common to the Southern Brigalow Belt of central Queensland was investigated. For an area near Injune, 1:4000 georeferenced stereo aerial photography, plot data relating to tree species and location, and stand visualisation software were used to identify individual tree crowns of six common woodland species within 1 m spatial resolution CASI data, from which their reflectance values were extracted. Based on transformed divergence and Jefferies-Matuista measures, the spectral separability of species was established. The analysis suggested that most species could be readily distinguished using CASI data, although shadowing within and between crowns was considered a limitation. The research, although preliminary, is anticipated to benefit scaling-up of plot-based estimates of biomass to the landscape and assessment of biodiversity.