Assesment of ENVI Forest Health Tool in Detection of Dust and Seepage Contaminated Forest Areas

ENVI software package is widely used in hyperspectral data analysis. ENVI features a forest health tool, which creates a spatial map showing the overall health and vigor of a forested region. General and quantitative forest health index, capable of detecting different types of forest damages, would be very useful in forest monitoring. The main objective of this study was to assess forest health tool's capability to detect dust and seepage contaminated forest areas. These areas were classified using various combinations of vegetation indices (VIs). The combination of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, Carotenoid Reflectance Index 1 and Water Band Index produced the best classification results. Overall results of this study shows that ENVI forest health tool can provide valuable information when detecting dust and seepage contaminated forest areas.