Cutblock mean DN values were sorted according to the landforms or year of cutting. Cutblocks on the 5 landforms were compared to the forest stands. Throughout the year, cutblocks on glacially-derived till are usually lighter than are cutblocks on lacustrine sediments. Research is ongoing at an abandoned acid mine site near Timmins, Ontario to evaluate realtions between forest structural damage symptoms and spectra, textural, and radiometric fraction information in high-resolution airborne digital camera imagery. To study relations between any two of the four data sets, each consisting of a multitude of v ariables, canonical correlation analysis was conducted using the principal components of each data set.
Results show that some forest structural variables exhibit strong relation swith soil properties.
For example, greater tree blowdown in associated with sandier soils and less soil organic matter. From relation s between teh image and relative forest structure avariables, it was found that a decrease in leaf area, canopy closure and stem size, an increase in dead and blowdown basal area, and an increase in dead and blowdown numbers of stems are associated with an increase in image texture, texture variation, and sunlit brightness, and a decrease in average subscene brightness. From these results, an image-based forest helth index was developed that combines spectral and spatial information and is sensitive to the wide range of forest health conditions at the site. Building on successful applications of spectral mixture analysis in flat, boreal forest terrain, in this paper we extend this method to mountainous areas as part of a broader research objective to create a comprehensive, regional scale approach to remote estimation of forest biophysical information. Scene franciton validation at higher altitudes was performed against a reference classification image derived at the lowest altitude interpreted to represent sub-pixel fractions at coarser scales.