抄録
This paper discusses about the technical issues on the production and utilization of digital vegetation maps using GIS. The vegetation map is one of the important spatial information in the field of natural environmental studies, and is frequently used for wildlife habitats conservation, monitoring works as well as environmental assessment. GIS plays an important role on the above analysis, and it becomes a common tool not only for the GIS specialists but also the common end-users who analyze the environmental phenomena with various maps.
As methodological discussions on the vegetation mapping with GIS, it is firstly emphasized that the digital ortho-rectified aerial photos and high resolution satellite images can contribute to classify and map the vegetation at a scale of 1 : 25, 000 effectively and efficiently. The ortho photos are very effective, and they can be easily used as background images for the visual interpretation on the PC-displays. The advantages of digital ortho include that ; the interpreters are free to select the scale of presentation according to the minimum mapping unit of vegetation. The alternative is to apply the high resolution satellite images such as QuickBird or IKONOS. They can provide the images having almost same spatial resolution with ortho photos. The superior of these images is that the multi-spectral analysis can be performed for both manual interpretation and automated classification. More recently, it becomes clear that the object oriented image classification method is more effective than the pixel based procedure for the high resolution satellite images.
The final discussion is regarding the contents of attribute in conjunction with vegetation map. The detail records of vegetation survey in the field have been stored in the database with their geographical locations, so that various levels of users can select the necessary information according to their requirements. The multi-layer structure database of GIS makes it possible with much flexibility. For the appropriate utilization and diffusion of vegetation maps, the metadata which describe the mapping process and methodology of each vegetation map are highly recommended.
