A remote sensing study in support of the Kokoda Track conservation initiative

The Kokoda Track area of Papua New Guinea is geographically diverse, with terrain varying from coastal areas to steep mountains, and biomes that extend from mangroves, to grasslands and savannas, and primary forests. The area is the subject of conservation measures using remotely sensed data in a collaboration between the Australian and Papua New Guinea governments. We describe this Kokoda Track initiative and the land cover mapping to be used as a basis for land use planning. We discuss hydromorphological analysis and land cover classification extracted from Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. Our land cover analysis has employed two classification techniques, both object-based, and has included texture measures calculated from SAR imagery. The output is a high resolution classification product, to be used by local government stakeholders.