BioSCape Invasive Alien Plant map for the Cape Floristic Region

Background

This project was supported by the NASA BioSCape Project: “Impacts of Invasive Alien Species on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning”. The training data used to produce this classification are also available. This dataset consists of a raw, unprocessed classification map of key woody invasive alien plant taxa (hereafter “trees”) within the Cape Floristic Region. This classification was generated using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery at a 10 m resolution using a Random Forest machine learning classifier. There has been no post-processing, and therefore it should be used with caution, especially in combination with the uncertainty layer provided.

Dataset specifications

Data type: Raster (tiff)

Resolution: 10 m

Geographic Coordinate System: WGS 1984

Projected Coordinate System: Albers Equal Area projection (AEA)

There is no EPSG for this, however the Well-Known Text (WKT) for this projected coordinate system is as follows:

var wktAEA = 'PROJCS["AEA_RSA_WGS84",' +

'GEOGCS["GCS_WGS_1984",' +

'DATUM["D_WGS_1984",' +

'SPHEROID["WGS_1984",6378137.0,298.257223563]],' +

'PRIMEM["Greenwich",0.0],' +

'UNIT["Degree",0.0174532925199433]],' +

'PROJECTION["Albers"],' +

'PARAMETER["False_Easting",0.0],' +

'PARAMETER["False_Northing",0.0],' +

'PARAMETER["Central_Meridian",25.0],' +

'PARAMETER["Standard_Parallel_1",-24.0],' +

'PARAMETER["Standard_Parallel_2",-33.0],' +

'PARAMETER["Latitude_Of_Origin",0.0],' +

'UNIT["Meter",1.0]]';

Bands

This raster has two bands, the details of which are described in Table 1.

Classes

Six classes of woody invasive alien plants were mapped in this classification (Table 2). This classification goes to genus level only and gives only presence/absence information together with information on uncertainty. Some classes were much harder to map than others and hence have higher uncertainty, such as Poplar and Hakea. A class was added for all the other invasive alien taxa which had large coverage though not enough for their own classes: “Other”.