English

Forest tree species classification and entropy-derived uncertainty mapping using extreme gradient boosting and Sentinel-1/2 satellite data

Quantitative Methods 2025-12-03 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

We present a new 10-meter map of dominant tree species in Swedish forests accompanied by pixel-level uncertainty estimates. The tree species classification is based on spatiotemporal metrics derived from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite data, combined with field observations from the Swedish National Forest Inventory. We apply an extreme gradient boosting model with Bayesian optimization to relate field observations to satellite-derived features and generate the final species map. Classification uncertainty is quantified using Shannon's entropy of the predicted class probabilities, which provide a spatially explicit measure of model confidence. The final model achieved an overall accuracy of 85% (F1 score = 0.82, Matthews correlation coefficient = 0.81), and mapped species distributions showed strong agreement with official forest statistics (Spearman's rho = 0.94).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.18228,
  title  = {Forest tree species classification and entropy-derived uncertainty mapping using extreme gradient boosting and Sentinel-1/2 satellite data},
  author = {Abdulhakim M. Abdi and Fan Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.18228},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

30 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:50:35.824Z