Detection of Larch Forest Stress from Jas’s Larch Inchworm (Erannis jacobsoni Djak) Attack Using Hyperspectral Remote Sensing

Detection of forest pest outbreaks can help in controlling outbreaks and provide accurate information for forest management decision-making. Although some needle injuries occur at the beginning of the attack, the appearance of the trees does not change significantly from the condition before the attack. These subtle changes cannot be observed with the naked eye, but usually manifest as small changes in leaf reflectance. Therefore, hyperspectral remote sensing can be used to detect the different stages of pest infection as it offers high-resolution reflectance. Accordingly, this study investigated the response of a larch forest to Jas’s Larch Inchworm (Erannis jacobsoni Djak) and performed the different infection stages detection and identification using ground hyperspectral data and data on the forest biochemical components (chlorophyll content, fresh weight moisture content and dry weight moisture content). A total of 80 sample trees were selected from the test area, covering the following three stages: before attack, early-stage infection and middle- to late-stage infection. Combined with the Findpeaks-SPA function, the response relationship between biochemical components and spectral continuous wavelet coefficients was analyzed. The support vector machine classification algorithm was used for detection infection. The results showed that there was no significant difference in the biochemical composition between healthy and early-stage samples, but the spectral continuous wavelet coefficients could reflect these subtle changes with varying degrees of sensitivity. The continuous wavelet coefficients corresponding to these stresses may have high potential for infection detection. Meanwhile, the highest overall accuracy of the model based on chlorophyll content, fresh weight moisture content and dry weight moisture content were 90.48%, 85.71% and 90.48% respectively, and the Kappa coefficients were 0.85, 0.79 and 0.86 respectively.