Object-based delineation of homogeneous landscape units at regional scale based on MODIS time series

Author(s):  
Mar Bisquert ◽  
Agnès Bégué ◽  
Michel Deshayes
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 659
Author(s):  
Jinquan Ai ◽  
Chao Zhang ◽  
Lijuan Chen ◽  
Dajun Li

A system understanding of the patterns, causes, and trends of long-term land use and land cover (LULC) change at the regional scale is essential for policy makers to address the growing challenges of local sustainability and global climate change. However, it still remains a challenge for estuarine and coastal regions due to the lack of appropriate approaches to consistently generate accurate and long-term LULC maps. In this work, an object-based classification framework was designed to mapping annual LULC changes in the Yangtze River estuary region from 1985–2016 using Landsat time series data. Characteristics of the inter-annual changes of LULC was then analyzed. The results showed that the object-based classification framework could accurately produce annual time series of LULC maps with overall accuracies over 86% for all single-year classifications. Results also indicated that the annual LULC maps enabled the clear depiction of the long-term variability of LULC and could be used to monitor the gradual changes that would not be observed using bi-temporal or sparse time series maps. Specifically, the impervious area rapidly increased from 6.42% to 22.55% of the total land area from 1985 to 2016, whereas the cropland area dramatically decreased from 80.61% to 55.44%. In contrast to the area of forest and grassland, which almost tripled, the area of inland water remained consistent from 1985 to 2008 and slightly increased from 2008 to 2016. However, the area of coastal marshes and barren tidal flats varied with large fluctuations.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (14) ◽  
pp. 4407-4419 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. L. Olsen ◽  
S. Miehe ◽  
P. Ceccato ◽  
R. Fensholt

Abstract. Most regional scale studies of vegetation in the Sahel have been based on Earth observation (EO) imagery due to the limited number of sites providing continuous and long term in situ meteorological and vegetation measurements. From a long time series of coarse resolution normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data a greening of the Sahel since the 1980s has been identified. However, it is poorly understood how commonly applied remote sensing techniques reflect the influence of extensive grazing (and changes in grazing pressure) on natural rangeland vegetation. This paper analyses the time series of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) NDVI metrics by comparing it with data from the Widou Thiengoly test site in northern Senegal. Field data include grazing intensity, end of season standing biomass (ESSB) and species composition from sizeable areas suitable for comparison with moderate – coarse resolution satellite imagery. It is shown that sampling plots excluded from grazing have a different species composition characterized by a longer growth cycle as compared to plots under controlled grazing or communal grazing. Also substantially higher ESSB is observed for grazing exclosures as compared to grazed areas, substantially exceeding the amount of biomass expected to be ingested by livestock for this area. The seasonal integrated NDVI (NDVI small integral; capturing only the signal inherent to the growing season recurrent vegetation), derived using absolute thresholds to estimate start and end of growing seasons, is identified as the metric most strongly related to ESSB for all grazing regimes. However plot-pixel comparisons demonstrate how the NDVI/ESSB relationship changes due to grazing-induced variation in annual plant species composition and the NDVI values for grazed plots are only slightly lower than the values observed for the ungrazed plots. Hence, average ESSB in ungrazed plots since 2000 was 0.93 t ha−1, compared to 0.51 t ha−1 for plots subjected to controlled grazing and 0.49 t ha−1 for communally grazed plots, but the average integrated NDVI values for the same period were 1.56, 1.49, and 1.45 for ungrazed, controlled and communal, respectively, i.e. a much smaller difference. This indicates that a grazing-induced development towards less ESSB and shorter-cycled annual plants with reduced ability to turn additional water in wet years into biomass is not adequately captured by seasonal NDVI metrics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 1546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Potter ◽  
Olivia Alexander

Understanding trends in vegetation phenology and growing season productivity at a regional scale is important for global change studies, particularly as linkages can be made between climate shifts and the vegetation’s potential to sequester or release carbon into the atmosphere. Trends and geographic patterns of change in vegetation growth and phenology from the MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite data sets were analyzed for the state of Alaska over the period 2000 to 2018. Phenology metrics derived from the MODIS Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time-series at 250 m resolution tracked changes in the total integrated greenness cover (TIN), maximum annual NDVI (MAXN), and start of the season timing (SOST) date over the past two decades. SOST trends showed significantly earlier seasonal vegetation greening (at more than one day per year) across the northeastern Brooks Range Mountains, on the Yukon-Kuskokwim coastal plain, and in the southern coastal areas of Alaska. TIN and MAXN have increased significantly across the western Arctic Coastal Plain and within the perimeters of most large wildfires of the Interior boreal region that burned since the year 2000, whereas TIN and MAXN have decreased notably in watersheds of Bristol Bay and in the Cook Inlet lowlands of southwestern Alaska, in the same regions where earlier-trending SOST was also detected. Mapping results from this MODIS time-series analysis have identified a new database of localized study locations across Alaska where vegetation phenology has recently shifted notably, and where land cover types and ecosystem processes could be changing rapidly.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Biwei Wang ◽  
Zengxiang Zhang ◽  
Xiao Wang ◽  
Xiaoli Zhao ◽  
Ling Yi ◽  
...  

Gully erosion is a widespread natural hazard. Gully mapping is critical to erosion monitoring and the control of degraded areas. The analysis of high-resolution remote sensing images (HRI) and terrain data mixed with developed object-based methods and field verification has been certified as a good solution for automatic gully mapping. Considering the availability of data, we used only open-source optical images (Google Earth images) to identify gully erosion through image feature modeling based on OBIA (Object-Based Image Analysis) in this paper. A two-end extrusion method using the optimal machine learning algorithm (Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM)) and eCognition software was applied for the automatic extraction of gullies at a regional scale in the black soil region of Northeast China. Due to the characteristics of optical images and the design of the method, unmanaged gullies and gullies harnessed in non-forest areas were the objects of extraction. Moderate success was achieved in the absence of terrain data. According to independent validation, the true overestimation ranged from 20% to 30% and was mainly caused by land use types with high erosion risks, such as bare land and farm lanes being falsely classified as gullies. An underestimation of less than 40% was adjacent to the correctly extracted gullied areas. The results of extraction in regions with geographical object categories of a low complexity were usually more satisfactory. The overall performance demonstrates that the present method is feasible for gully mapping at a regional scale, with high automation, low cost, and acceptable accuracy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 172988141987679
Author(s):  
Kohjiro Hashimoto ◽  
Tetsuyasu Yamada ◽  
Takeshi Tsuchiya ◽  
Kae Doki ◽  
Yuki Funabora ◽  
...  

With increase in the number of elderly people in the Japanese society, traffic accidents caused by elderly driver is considered problematic. The primary factor of the traffic accidents is a reduction in their driving cognitive performance. Therefore, a system that supports the cognitive performance of drivers can greatly contribute in preventing accidents. Recently, the development of devices for visually providing information, such as smart glasses or head up display, is in progress. These devices can provide more effective supporting information for cognitive performance. In this article, we focus on the selection problem of information to be presented for drivers to realize the cognitive support system. It has been reported that the presentation of excessive information to a driver reduces the judgment ability of the driver and makes the information less trustworthy. Thus, indiscriminate presentation of information in the vision of the driver is not an effective cognitive support. Therefore, a mechanism for determining the information to be presented to the driver based on the current driving situation is required. In this study, the object that contributes to execution of avoidance driving operation is regarded as the object that drivers must recognize and present for drivers. This object is called as contributing object. In this article, we propose a method that selects contributing objects among the appeared objects on the current driving scene. The proposed method expresses the relation between the time series change of an appeared object and avoidance operation of the driver by a mathematical model. This model can predict execution timing of avoidance driving operation and estimate contributing object based on the prediction result of driving operation. This model named as contributing model consisted of multi-hidden Markov models. Hidden Markov model is time series probabilistic model with high readability. This is because that model parameters express the probabilistic distribution and its statistics. Therefore, the characteristics of contributing model are that it enables the designer to understand the basis for the output decision. In this article, we evaluated detection accuracy of contributing object based on the proposed method, and readability of contributing model through several experiments. According to the results of these experiments, high detection accuracy of contributing object was confirmed. Moreover, it was confirmed that the basis of detected contributing object judgment can be understood from contributing model.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 570 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inacio Bueno ◽  
Fausto Acerbi Júnior ◽  
Eduarda Silveira ◽  
José Mello ◽  
Luís Carvalho ◽  
...  

Change detection methods are often incapable of accurately detecting changes within time series that are heavily influenced by seasonal variations. Techniques for de-seasoning time series or methods that apply the spatial context have been used to improve the results of change detection. However, few studies have explored Landsat’s shortwave infrared channel (SWIR 2) to discriminate between seasonal changes and land use/land cover changes (LULCC). Here, we explored the effectiveness of Operational Land Imager (OLI) spectral bands and vegetation indices for detecting deforestation in highly seasonal areas of Brazilian savannas. We adopted object-based image analysis (OBIA), applying a multidate segmentation to an OLI time series to generate input data for discrimination of deforestation from seasonal changes using the Random Forest (RF) algorithm. We found adequate separability between deforested objects and seasonal changes using SWIR 2. Using spectral indices computed from SWIR 2, the RF algorithm generated a change map with an overall accuracy of 88.3%. For deforestation, the producer’s accuracy was 88.0% and the user’s accuracy was 84.6%. The SWIR 2 channel as well as the mid-infrared burn index presented the highest importance among spectral variables computed by the RF average impurity decrease measure. Our results give support to further change detection studies regarding to suitable spectral channels and provided a useful foundation for savanna change detection using an object-based method applied to Landsat time series.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (22) ◽  
pp. 3798
Author(s):  
Lei Ma ◽  
Michael Schmitt ◽  
Xiaoxiang Zhu

Recently, time-series from optical satellite data have been frequently used in object-based land-cover classification. This poses a significant challenge to object-based image analysis (OBIA) owing to the presence of complex spatio-temporal information in the time-series data. This study evaluates object-based land-cover classification in the northern suburbs of Munich using time-series from optical Sentinel data. Using a random forest classifier as the backbone, experiments were designed to analyze the impact of the segmentation scale, features (including spectral and temporal features), categories, frequency, and acquisition timing of optical satellite images. Based on our analyses, the following findings are reported: (1) Optical Sentinel images acquired over four seasons can make a significant contribution to the classification of agricultural areas, even though this contribution varies between spectral bands for the same period. (2) The use of time-series data alleviates the issue of identifying the “optimal” segmentation scale. The finding of this study can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the effects of classification uncertainty on object-based dense multi-temporal image classification.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (14) ◽  
pp. 2241
Author(s):  
María José López García

Sea Surface Temperature (SST) is a key parameter for understanding atmospheric and oceanic processes. Since the late 1980s, infrared satellite images have been used to complement in situ records for studying the temporal and spatial variability of SST. The Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s satellite was the first sensor successfully used to compute SST following the development and validation of the atmospheric correction algorithm known as “split-window”. More recently, the MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Terra and Aqua satellites, launched in 1999 and 2002, respectively, also provides SST products which can be combined with AVHRR series to complete the analysis of time series. This paper presents a comparison of the monthly SST data derived from both sensors, AVHRR and MODIS, in a series of ten years (2000–2009) in the Western Mediterranean basins. The results showed a high correlation (R2 = 0.99) between the sensors when averaged values at the regional scale were compared. SST obtained from AVHRR were slightly higher (+0.18 °C ± 0.2 °C, on average) than SST from MODIS. The series were most similar during winter and spring (+0.09 °C ± 0.1 °C for January to May) with a greater difference from June to December (+0.24 °C ± 0.2 °C). The comparative analysis showed that the two sensors can be used jointly to estimate long-term trends at the regional scale.


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