scholarly journals The Use of Very-High-Resolution Aerial Imagery to Estimate the Structure and Distribution of the Rhanterium epapposum Community for Long-Term Monitoring in Desert Ecosystems

Plants ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 977
Author(s):  
Meshal M. Abdullah ◽  
Zahraa M. Al-Ali ◽  
Mansour T. Abdullah ◽  
Bader Al-Anzi

The rapid assessment and monitoring of native desert plants are essential in restoration and revegetation projects to track the changes in vegetation patterns in terms of vegetation coverage and structure. This work investigated advanced vegetation monitoring methods utilizing UAVs and remote sensing techniques at the Al Abdali protected site in Kuwait. The study examined the effectiveness of using UAV techniques to assess the structure of desert plants. We specifically examined the use of very-high-resolution aerial imagery to estimate the vegetation structure of Rhanterium epapposum (perennial desert shrub), assess the vegetation cover density changes in desert plants after rainfall events, and investigate the relationship between the distribution of perennial shrub structure and vegetation cover density of annual plants. The images were classified using supervised classification techniques (the SVM method) to assess the changes in desert plants after extreme rainfall events. A digital terrain model (DTM) and a digital surface model (DSM) were also generated to estimate the maximum shrub heights. The classified imagery results show that a significant increase in vegetation coverage occurred in the annual plants after rainfall events. The results also show a reasonable correlation between the shrub heights estimated using UAVs and the ground-truth measurements (R² = 0.66, p < 0.01). The shrub heights were higher in the high-cover-density plots, with coverage >30% and an average height of 77 cm. However, in the medium-cover-density (MD) plots, the coverage was <30%, and the average height was 52 cm. Our study suggests that utilizing UAVs can provide several advantages to critically support future ecological studies and revegetation and restoration programs in desert ecosystems.

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 548-562 ◽  
Author(s):  
Auguste Gires ◽  
Ioulia Tchiguirinskaia ◽  
Daniel Schertzer ◽  
Alexis Berne

Abstract Data collected during four heavy rainfall events that occurred in Ardèche (France) with the help of a 2D video disdrometer (2DVD) are used to investigate the structure of the raindrop distribution in both space and time. A first type of analysis is based on the reconstruction of 36-m-height vertical rainfall columns above the measuring device. This reconstruction is obtained with the help of a ballistic hypothesis applied to 1-ms time step series. The corresponding snapshots are analyzed with the help of universal multifractals. For comparison, a similar analysis is performed on the time series with 1-ms time steps, as well as on time series of accumulation maps of N consecutive recorded drops (therefore with variable time steps). It turns out that the drop distribution exhibits a good scaling behavior in the range 0.5–36 m during the heaviest portion of the events, confirming the lack of empirical evidence of the widely used homogenous assumption for drop distribution. For smaller scales, drop positions seem to be homogeneously distributed. The notion of multifractal singularity is well illustrated by the very high-resolution time series.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (24) ◽  
pp. 2970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ziran Ye ◽  
Yongyong Fu ◽  
Muye Gan ◽  
Jinsong Deng ◽  
Alexis Comber ◽  
...  

Automated methods to extract buildings from very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing data have many applications in a wide range of fields. Many convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods have been proposed and have achieved significant advances in the building extraction task. In order to refine predictions, a lot of recent approaches fuse features from earlier layers of CNNs to introduce abundant spatial information, which is known as skip connection. However, this strategy of reusing earlier features directly without processing could reduce the performance of the network. To address this problem, we propose a novel fully convolutional network (FCN) that adopts attention based re-weighting to extract buildings from aerial imagery. Specifically, we consider the semantic gap between features from different stages and leverage the attention mechanism to bridge the gap prior to the fusion of features. The inferred attention weights along spatial and channel-wise dimensions make the low level feature maps adaptive to high level feature maps in a target-oriented manner. Experimental results on three publicly available aerial imagery datasets show that the proposed model (RFA-UNet) achieves comparable and improved performance compared to other state-of-the-art models for building extraction.


2021 ◽  
pp. 61-80
Author(s):  
Avinash Chouhan ◽  
Dibyajyoti Chutia ◽  
P. L. N. Raju

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document