Mehmood Kaleem, Anees Shoaib Ahmad, Muhammad Sultan, Shahzad Fahad, Liu Qijing, Khan Waseem Razzaq, Shrahili Mansour, Ansari Mohammad Javed, Dube Timothy
College of Forestry Beijing Forestry University Beijing China.
Key Laboratory for Silviculture and Conservation of Ministry of Education Beijing Forestry University Beijing China.
Ecol Evol. 2025 Feb 19;15(2):e70736. doi: 10.1002/ece3.70736. eCollection 2025 Feb.
This study evaluates the Billion Tree Afforestation Project (BTAP) in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province using remote sensing and machine learning. Applying Random Forest (RF) classification to Sentinel-2 imagery, we observed an increase in tree cover from 25.02% in 2015 to 29.99% in 2023 and a decrease in barren land from 20.64% to 16.81%, with an accuracy above 85%. Hotspot and spatial clustering analyses revealed significant vegetation recovery, with high-confidence hotspots rising from 36.76% to 42.56%. A predictive model for the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), supported by SHAP analysis, identified soil moisture and precipitation as primary drivers of vegetation growth, with the ANN model achieving an of 0.8556 and an RMSE of 0.0607 on the testing dataset. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating machine learning with remote sensing as a framework to support data-driven afforestation efforts and inform sustainable environmental management practices.
本研究利用遥感和机器学习对巴基斯坦开伯尔-普赫图赫瓦省(KPK)的十亿棵树造林项目(BTAP)进行了评估。通过对哨兵-2影像应用随机森林(RF)分类,我们观察到树木覆盖面积从2015年的25.02%增加到2023年的29.99%,荒地面积从20.64%减少到16.81%,准确率超过85%。热点和空间聚类分析显示植被有显著恢复,高置信度热点从36.76%增至42.56%。在SHAP分析的支持下,归一化植被指数(NDVI)的预测模型确定土壤湿度和降水是植被生长的主要驱动因素,人工神经网络(ANN)模型在测试数据集上的R²为0.8556,均方根误差(RMSE)为0.0607。这些结果证明了将机器学习与遥感相结合作为支持数据驱动的造林工作及为可持续环境管理实践提供信息的框架的有效性。