Study on the Influencing Factors of Forest Tree-Species Classification Based on Landsat and Sentinel-2 Imagery

Accurate forest tree-species classification not only provides data support for forest resource management but also serves as a crucial parameter for simulating various ecological processes. However, the results of forest tree-species classification have been affected by multiple factors, such as the spectral resolution, spatial resolution, and radiometric resolution of imagery, the classification algorithms used, the sample size, and the timing of image acquisition phases. Although there are many studies on the impact of individual factors on tree-species classification, there is a lack of systematic studies quantifying the magnitude of these factors’ influences, leading to uncertainties about the relative importance of different factors. In this study, Landsat-8, Landsat-9, and Sentinel-2 imagery was used as the foundational data, and random forest (RF), gradient tree boosting (GTB), and support vector machine (SVM) algorithms were employed to classify forest tree species. High-accuracy regional forest tree-species classification was achieved by exploring the impacts of spectral resolution, spatial resolution, radiometric resolution, classification algorithms, sample size, and image time phases. The results show that, for the commonly used Landsat-8, Landsat-9, and Sentinel-2 imagery, the tree-species classification results from Landsat-9 are the best, with an overall accuracy of 74.21% and a kappa of 0.71. Among the various influencing factors, the classification algorithm, image time phases, and sample size have relatively larger impacts on tree-species classification results, each exceeding 10%, while the positive impact of radiometric resolution is the smallest, at only 3.15%. Conversely, spectral and spatial resolutions had negative effects on tree-species classification results, at −4.09% and −1.4%, respectively. Based on the 30-m spring Landsat-9 and Sentinel-2 imagery, with 300 samples for each tree-species category, the classification results using the RF algorithm were the best, with an overall accuracy of 87.07% and a kappa coefficient of 0.85. The results indicate that different factors have different impacts on forest tree-species classification results, with classification algorithms, image time phases, and sample size having the largest impacts. Higher spatial and spectral resolutions do not improve the classification accuracy. Therefore, future studies should focus on selecting appropriate classification algorithms, sample sizes, and images from seasons with greater tree differences to improve tree-species classification results.