Trends in Horticulture (2021) Volume 4 Issue 1 doi:10.24294/th.v4i1.1797 29 Original Research Article Volumetric spatiality of wood in forests with artificial neural net- works based on satellite imagery Argemiro José Moreno Arteaga * , Monica Fabiana Bento Moreira Thiersch, Roberta Oliveira Averna Valente, Lucas Kröhling Bernardi, Sophia Lourenço Vasconcelos, Cláudio Roberto Thiersch Universidad Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar), Brazil. E-mail: argemor29@gmail.com ABSTRACT Sustainable agriculture of forest plantations requires the permanent estimation of the amount or volume of wood being produced at any given time, which is difficult in large forest areas if only manual procedures are used in the field. In the present research, multilayer perceptron artificial neural networks (ANNs) were modeled for the spatial es- timation of wood volumes in a Eucalyptus sp. plantation located in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, Central-West re- gion of Brazil. For this purpose, spectral bands, band textures obtained with gray level cooccurrence matrix and vegeta- tion index, which were derived from SPOT 6 digital satellite image, were used as prediction variables. The resulting ANN with the best performance presented an accuracy of 93.32% and a coefficient of determination of 0.9761, with respect to values obtained with field measurements; however, it presented a relative mean square error of 16.32% (RMSE of 7.85 m 3 /hm 2 ), but the distribution of residuals was not biased, therefore, the model was promising for map- ping timber volumes in large areas without overestimating or underestimating the prediction. The constructed network showed greater precision and accuracy when compared to other methods using similar estimation variables, including when compared to neural models using only spectral bands and vegetation indices. Keywords: Biomass; Dendrometry; Remote Sensing; Multilayer Perceptron; Texture ARTICLE INFO Received: 18 January 2021 Accepted: 8 March 2021 Available online: 27 March 2021 COPYRIGHT Copyright © 2021 by author(s). Trends in Horticulture is published by EnPress Publisher LLC. This work is li- censed under the Creative Commons At- tribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ 4.0/ 1. Introduction Wood obtained from Eucalyptus sp. plantations is a fundamental resource for the series of socioeconomic services it provides in the manufacture of furniture, paper and energy generation, which has stim- ulated its massive production in an economically sustainable manner with efficient forest management of plantations, which requires perma- nent monitoring of the volumes of wood produced. The estimation of the amount of timber available or produced in forest plantations is typically done through allometric equations using tree measurements obtained in the field with trained personnel and spe- cialized materials and equipment, a difficult task to do in large areas, having as a conditioning factor the monetary investment and time [1] . The development of human knowledge has led to the integration of technologies in the activities involved in production systems, increasing their competitiveness in the market and reducing several activities that were previously performed manually. In this sense, digital images ob- tained by satellite with remote sensing are useful technologies for ob- taining land cover information, reducing field actions that can lead to procedural errors [2,3] . Image components such as spectral and de- rived bands of textural features and vegetation indices can be used as