Comparison of Different Vegetation Indexes for Determination of Forest Areas in Atakum (Samsun, Turkey)

The monitoring and analyzing of temporal changes of forest areas, which play a critical role in issues such as contributing to many vitally important geochemical and bioclimatic processes, providing a habitat and food resource for wildlife, providing direct or indirect socioeconomic products and services to people, is a very important issue. Measuring and monitoring of large forest areas using traditional methods are often costly and time-consuming. Today, a large number of remote sensing satellite systems have been developed in order to monitor natural resources, determine their temporal changes and manage them effectively. In this context, vegetation cover can also be monitored periodically, effectively, economically and fast with the satellite images and the necessary measures can be taken by evaluating the results. Many vegetation index algorithms have been developed for obtaining vegetation cover from satellite images. In this study, the vegetation cover of Atakum district (Samsun, Turkey) was investigated by using Landsat 8 OLI satellite image dated September 08, 2017 (Path: 175, Row: 31). For this purpose, six slope-based vegetation indexes including NDVI, TVI, CTVI, TTVI, RVI, and NRVI and ten distance-based vegetation indexes including PVI1, PVI2, PVI3, DVI, SAVI, TSAVI1, TSAVI2, MSAVI1, MSAVI2, and WDVI were used. Forest areas were extracted from a total of sixteen index images by applying threshold values and the performances of the vegetation indexes in the determination of forest areas were compared by superimposing the index results with ground surveying-based boundaries obtained from the Samsun Forestry Directorate