Background: Climate plays an important role in the growth process of various plant species, and the ebony species is no exception to this. Ebony (Diospyros celebica Bakh.) is a Sulawesi endemic flora species whose wood is widely used as a material for light to heavy construction and important raw material for Indonesia’s timber industry. Massive forest exploitation threatens preservation of the Diospyros celebica, so conservation is needed to save it from extinction. However, the difficulty in distinguishing Diospyros celebica in the tillering phase caused many seed collection errors, so a system was needed to identify plants correctly. This study aims to extract leaf morphological features, analyze the correlation between leaf morphological features and climate variables, and classify them based on the region where Diospyros celebica grows.
Result: The results show that several leaf morphological characteristics were sufficiently correlated with climate variables such as MAT and MAP. In dry weather, the leaves of Diospyros celebica tend to have relatively small leaf sizes, whereas, in wetter weather, the leaves tend to have a much larger size. The classification results could distinguish leaf morphology based on growing regions with an accuracy rate of 94.59%.
Conclusions: By obtaining a high level of classification accuracy, it can be interpreted that the size of the leaf morphology of the same species (Diospyros celebica) is different in each region, influenced by climate variables, in this case MAT and MAP.