Abstract

Three supervised pattern recognition methods (SPRM) were evaluated to discriminate between Eucalyptus globulus and Eucalyptus nitens species applying near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy on leaves. The methods used were k-nearest neighbor (KNN), soft modeling class analogy (SIMCA) and discriminant partial least squares (PLS-DA). First and second derivatives were used as transform techniques and mean-center (MC) and autoscaling (AS) as preprocessing techniques. The training set was constitued by 288 samples and 20 samples were used as validation set. A significant difference between the assayed methods was not observed, however best results for separation of classes and prediction rate were obtained when first derivative and MC were used for all the recognition pattern methods. Use of leaves and NIR spectroscopy avoids the destructive usual wood analysis in forest industries and facilities the fast classification of these species for forest applications.