Vegetation Characterization at Community Level Using Sentinel-2 Satellite Data and Random Forest Classifier in Western Himalayan Foothills, Uttarakhand

Author(s):  
Arun Pratap Mishra ◽  
Ishwari Datt Rai ◽  
Divesh Pangtey ◽  
Hitendra Padalia
Land ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 420
Author(s):  
Jiří Šandera ◽  
Přemysl Štych

Permanent grassland is one of the monitored categories of land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF) within the climate concept and greenhouse gas reduction policy (Regulation (EU) 2018/841). Mapping the conditions and changes of permanent grasslands is thus very important. The area of permanent grassland is strongly influenced by agricultural subsidy policies. Over the course of history, it is possible to trace different shares of permanent grassland within agricultural land and areas with significant changes from grassland to arable land. The need for monitoring permanent grassland and arable land has been growing in recent years. New subsidy policies determining farm management are beginning to affect land use, especially in countries that have joined the EU in recent waves. The large amount of freely available satellite data enables this monitoring to take place, mainly owing to data products of the Copernicus program. There are a large number of parameters (predictors) that can be calculated from satellite data, but finding the right combination is very difficult. This study presents a methodical, systematic procedure using the random forest classifier and its internal metric of mean decrease accuracy (MDA) to select the most suitable predictors to detect changes from permanent grassland to arable land. The relevance of suitable predictors takes into account the date of the satellite image, the overall accuracy of change detection, and the time required for calculations. Biological predictors, such as leaf area index (LAI), fraction absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FAPAR), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), etc. were tested in the form of a time series from the Sentinel-2 satellite, and the most suitable ones were selected. FAPAR, canopy water content (CWC), and LAI seemed to be the most suitable. The proposed change detection procedure achieved a very high accuracy of more than 95% within the study site with an area of 8766 km2.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 1642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristof Van Tricht ◽  
Anne Gobin ◽  
Sven Gilliams ◽  
Isabelle Piccard

A timely inventory of agricultural areas and crop types is an essential requirement for ensuring global food security and allowing early crop monitoring practices. Satellite remote sensing has proven to be an increasingly more reliable tool to identify crop types. With the Copernicus program and its Sentinel satellites, a growing source of satellite remote sensing data is publicly available at no charge. Here, we used joint Sentinel-1 radar and Sentinel-2 optical imagery to create a crop map for Belgium. To ensure homogenous radar and optical inputs across the country, Sentinel-1 12-day backscatter mosaics were created after incidence angle normalization, and Sentinel-2 normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) images were smoothed to yield 10-daily cloud-free mosaics. An optimized random forest classifier predicted the eight crop types with a maximum accuracy of 82% and a kappa coefficient of 0.77. We found that a combination of radar and optical imagery always outperformed a classification based on single-sensor inputs, and that classification performance increased throughout the season until July, when differences between crop types were largest. Furthermore, we showed that the concept of classification confidence derived from the random forest classifier provided insight into the reliability of the predicted class for each pixel, clearly showing that parcel borders have a lower classification confidence. We concluded that the synergistic use of radar and optical data for crop classification led to richer information increasing classification accuracies compared to optical-only classification. Further work should focus on object-level classification and crop monitoring to exploit the rich potential of combined radar and optical observations.


Forests ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 941
Author(s):  
Adam Waśniewski ◽  
Agata Hościło ◽  
Bogdan Zagajewski ◽  
Dieudonné Moukétou-Tarazewicz

This study is focused on the assessment of the potential of Sentinel-2 satellite images and the Random Forest classifier for mapping forest cover and forest types in northwest Gabon. The main goal was to investigate the impact of various spectral bands collected by the Sentinel-2 satellite, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and digital elevation model (DEM), and their combination on the accuracy of the classification of forest cover and forest type. Within the study area, five classes of forest type were delineated: semi-evergreen moist forest, lowland forest, freshwater swamp forest, mangroves, and disturbed natural forest. The classification was performed using the Random Forest (RF) classifier. The overall accuracy for the forest cover ranged between 92.6% and 98.5%, whereas for forest type, the accuracy was 83.4 to 97.4%. The highest accuracy for forest cover and forest type classifications were obtained using a combination of spectral bands at spatial resolutions of 10 m and 20 m and DEM. In both cases, the use of the NDVI did not increase the classification accuracy. The DEM was shown to be the most important variable in distinguishing the forest type. Among the Sentinel-2 spectral bands, the red-edge followed by the SWIR contributed the most to the accuracy of the forest type classification. Additionally, the Random Forest model for forest cover classification was successfully transferred from one master image to other images. In contrast, the transferability of the forest type model was more complex, because of the heterogeneity of the forest type and environmental conditions across the study area.


Author(s):  
E. Roteta ◽  
P. Oliva

Abstract. Due to the high variability of biomes throughout the country, the classification of burned areas is a challenge. We calibrated a random forest classifier to account for all this variability and ensure an accurate classification of burned areas. The classifier was optimized in three steps, generating a version of the burned area product in each step. According to the visual assessment, the final version of the BA product is more accurate than the perimeters created by the Chilean National Forest Corporation, which overestimate large burned areas because it does not consider the inner unburned areas and, it omits some small burned areas. The total burned surface from January to March 2017 was 5,000 km2 in Chile, 20 % of it belonging to a single burned area in the Maule Region, and with 91 % of the total burned surface distributed in 6 adjacent regions of Central Chile.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 543
Author(s):  
Tianxiang Zhang ◽  
Jinya Su ◽  
Zhiyong Xu ◽  
Yulin Luo ◽  
Jiangyun Li

Land cover classification is able to reflect the potential natural and social process in urban development, providing vital information to stakeholders. Recent solutions on land cover classification are generally addressed by remotely sensed imagery and supervised classification methods. However, a high-performance classifier is desirable but challenging due to the existence of model hyperparameters. Conventional approaches generally rely on manual tuning, which is time-consuming and far from satisfying. Therefore, this work aims to propose a systematic method to automatically tune the hyperparameters by Bayesian parameter optimization for the random forest classifier. The recently launched Sentinel-2A/B satellites are drawn to provide the remote sensing imageries for land cover classification case study in Beijing, China, which have the best spectral/spatial resolutions among the freely available satellites. The improved random forest with Bayesian parameter optimization is compared against the support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF) with default hyperparameters by discriminating five land cover classes including building, tree, road, water, and crop field. Comparative experimental results show that the optimized RF classifier outperforms the conventional SVM and the RF with default hyperparameters in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall. The effects of band/feature number and the band usefulness are also assessed. It is envisaged that the improved classifier for Sentinel-2 satellite image processing can find a wide range of applications where high-resolution satellite imagery classification is applicable.


2022 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-84
Author(s):  
Nurwita Mustika Sari ◽  
R. Rokhmatuloh ◽  
Masita Dwi Mandini Manessa

The existence of vegetation in an area has an important role to maintain the carrying capacity of the environment and create a comfortable environment as a place to live. In an effort to create a sustainable environment, there are various pressures on vegetation that cause a decrease in vegetation area. Economic activity, population growth and other anthropogenic activities trigger the dynamics of vegetation cover in an area that causes land cover changes from vegetation to non-vegetation. Majalengka Regency as one of the areas with intensive regional physical development in line with the operation of BIJB Kertajati and the Cipali toll road became the study area in this research. This study aims to monitor the dynamics of vegetation cover with the proposed method namely the integration of the OBIA and Random Forest classifier using multi temporal Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. The results show that there is a decrease in the area of vegetation in the research area as much as 4,329.6 hectares to non-vegetation areas in the period 2016-2020. The vegetation area in 2020 is 84,716.07 hectares and non-vegetation area is 35,708 hectares. Thus, there has been a decrease in the percentage of vegetation area from 73.94% in 2016 to 70.35% in 2020, meanwhile for non-vegetation areas there has been an increase from 26.06% in 2016 to 29.65% in 2020.


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