Abstract

NAVARRO CERRILLO, Rafael M. et al. Cartografía de la vegetación de la Isla de Bioko (Guinea Ecuatorial) mediante el uso de imágenes Landsat 7 etm+: particularización del piso afromontano. Darwiniana [online]. 2012, vol.50, n.2, pp.252-265. ISSN 0011-6793.

Sustainable forest management requires appropriate mapping information. In this work we developed a mapping of the current vegetation of Bioko island (Equatorial Guinea) based on supervised classification of a Landsat 7 ETM +, and a mapping of Afromontane forests, including data distribution, surface and forest types where Prunus africana occurs. We propose six new types of transitional vegetation between Guinean-Congolese forest and Afromontane forests and different secondary Afromontane formations. The vegetation map of Bioko had a Kappa coefficient of 0.69. Difficulties were encountered in separating secondary lowland forest classes from transition zones between Guineo-Congolian and Afromontane forests. Accuracy was highly improved when a second classification was restricted to the island’s Afromontane vegetation (>1400 m a.s.l.), yielding a Kappa coefficient of 0.81. Our results have appropiate accuracy for forest management demonstrating that remote sensing is a useful source for mapping development, especially in tropical areas with difficult access.

Keywords : Africa; Afromontane vegetation; Forest cartography; Prunus; Remote-sensing; Satellite images; vegetation types.