Alkan Ece, MSc

Differentiating areas of insect damage in forests from areas of healthy vegetation and predicting the future spread of damage increase are an important part of forest health monitoring. Thanks to the wide coverage and temporal observation advantage of remote sensing data, predicting the future direction of insect damage spread can enable accurate and uninterrupted management and operational control to minimize damage. However, due to the large amount of remotely sensed data, it is difficult to process the data and to identify damage distinctions. Therefore, this paper proposes a spatio-temporal Autoregressive Integrated Moving-Average (ARIMA) prediction model based on the Machine Learning technique for processing big data by monitoring oak lace bug (Corythucha arcuata (Heteroptera: Tingidae)) damage with remote sensing data. The advantage of this model is the automatic selection of optimal parameters to provide better forecasting with univariate time series. Thus, multiple spatio-temporal warning levels are distinguished according to the damage growth trend in the series, and the network is constructed with improved time series to better predict future insect damage spread. In the proposed model, the historical Red (R) – Green (G) – Blue (B) bands of the Sentinel-2 (GSD 10 m) satellite were tested as a dataset for the oak lace bug damage in the oak forest situated in the campus of Düzce University, Turkey. The dataset, which contained 38 images for each of the RGB bands, was modeled using the open source R programming language for the peak damage period in 2021. As a result of the test, significant correlations were found between the synthetic and true images (True and synthetic band 2: r=0.960, p<0.001; True and synthetic band 3: r=0.945, p<0.001; True and synthetic band 4: r=0.962, p<0.001). Then, the 48-month time series bands were modeled, and the band estimates were made to predict the August 2023 spread. Finally, a synthetic composite image was created for future prediction using the predicted bands. The tests showed that the model had a good performance in insect damage monitoring. With open access Sentinel-2 images, the proposed model achieved the highest prediction accuracy with a rate of 96%, and had a small prediction error.