Dealing with vagueness in complex forest landscapes: A soft classification approach through a niche-based distribution model

The increasing interest in biodiversity conservation has led to the development of new approaches to facilitate ecologically based conservation policies and management plans. In this context, the development of effective methods for the classification of forest types constitutes a crucial issue as forests represent the most widespread vegetation structure and play a key role in ecosystem functioning. In this study a maximum entropy approach (Maxent) to forest type classification in a complex Mediterranean area, has been investigated. Maxent, a niche-based model of species/habitat distribution, allowed researchers to estimate the potential distribution of four forest types: Holm oak, Mixed oak, Mixed broadleaved and Riparian forests. The Maxent model's internal tests have proved a powerful tool for estimating the model's accuracy and analyzing the effects of the most important variables in the produced models. Moreover the comparison with a spectral response-based fuzzy classification, showed a higher accuracy in the Maxent outputs, demonstrating how the use of environmental variables, combined with spectral information in the classification of natural or seminatural land cover classes, improves map accuracies. The modeling approach followed by this study, taking into account the uncertainty proper of the natural ecosystems and the use of environmental variables in land cover classification, can represent a useful approach to making more efficient and effective field inventories and to developing effective conservation policies.