Improving the estimation of alpine grassland fractional vegetation cover using optimized algorithms and multi-dimensional features

BACKGROUND: Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is an important basic parameter for the quantitative monitoring of the alpine grassland ecosystem on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. Based on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) acquisition of measured data and matching it with satellite remote sensing images at the pixel scale, the proper selection of driving data and inversion algorithms can be determined and is crucial for generating high-precision alpine grassland FVC products. METHODS: This study presents estimations of alpine grassland FVC using optimized algorithms and multi-dimensional features. The multi-dimensional feature set (using original spectral bands, 22 vegetation indices, and topographical factors) was constructed from many sources of information, then the optimal feature subset was determined based on different feature selection algorithms as the driving data for optimized machine learning algorithms. Finally, the inversion accuracy, sensitivity to sample size, and computational efficiency of the four machine learning algorithms were evaluated. RESULTS: (1) The random forest (RF) algorithm (R(2): 0.861, RMSE: 9.5%) performed the best for FVC inversion among the four machine learning algorithms driven by the four typical vegetation indices. (2) Compared with the four typical vegetation indices, using multi-dimensional feature sets as driving data obviously improved the FVC inversion accuracy of the four machine learning algorithms (R(2) of the RF algorithm increased to 0.890). (3) Among the three variable selection algorithms (Boruta, sequential forward selection [SFS], and permutation importance-recursive feature elimination [PI-RFE]), the constructed PI-RFE feature selection algorithm had the best dimensionality reduction effect on the multi-dimensional feature set. (4) The hyper-parameter optimization of the machine learning algorithms and feature selection of the multi-dimensional feature set further improved FVC inversion accuracy (R(2): 0.917 and RMSE: 7.9% in the optimized RF algorithm). CONCLUSION: This study provides a highly precise, optimized algorithm with an optimal multi-dimensional feature set for FVC inversion, which is vital for the quantitative monitoring of the ecological environment of alpine grassland.