Vegetation of the greater Maya Mountains,Belize |
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Authors: | Malcolm G Penn David A Sutton Alex Monro |
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Institution: | 1. Botany Department , The Natural History Museum , Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD, UK E-mail: M.Penn@nhm.ac.uk;2. Botany Department , The Natural History Museum , Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD, UK |
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Abstract: | This paper describes a new vegetation classification for the Greater Maya Mountains of Belize, focusing primarily on the Chiquibul Forest Reserve. Extensive use is made of GIS, remote sensing, botanical collections and field visits to provide a macro‐ and meso‐scale overview of the vegetation of this region. A total of 32 vegetation classes have been defined, both geographically and structurally, including 11 new classes. Where possible, classes have been compared with earlier classifications. A dominant scaling technique has been used to enable direct comparison between ground truthing data and a supervised Maximum Likelihood Classifier image‐based vegetation classification. The merits of such classifications and the effect of scale are discussed. |
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Keywords: | Belize Chiquibul forest Geographical Information System (GIS) Greater Maya Mountains Maximum Likelihood Classifier (MLC) Maya Mountains micro‐meso‐ and macro‐scales normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) remote sensing scaling‐up tropical forest vegetation classification |
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