scholarly journals Combining Multiband Remote Sensing and Hierarchical Distance Sampling to Establish Drivers of Bird Abundance

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronny Richter ◽  
Arend Heim ◽  
Wieland Heim ◽  
Johannes Kamp ◽  
Michael Vohland

Information on habitat preferences is critical for the successful conservation of endangered species. For many species, especially those living in remote areas, we currently lack this information. Time and financial resources to analyze habitat use are limited. We aimed to develop a method to describe habitat preferences based on a combination of bird surveys with remotely sensed fine-scale land cover maps. We created a blended multiband remote sensing product from SPOT 6 and Landsat 8 data with a high spatial resolution. We surveyed populations of three bird species (Yellow-breasted Bunting Emberiza aureola, Ochre-rumped Bunting Emberiza yessoensis, and Black-faced Bunting Emberiza spodocephala) at a study site in the Russian Far East using hierarchical distance sampling, a survey method that allows to correct for varying detection probability. Combining the bird survey data and land cover variables from the remote sensing product allowed us to model population density as a function of environmental variables. We found that even small-scale land cover characteristics were predictable using remote sensing data with sufficient accuracy. The overall classification accuracy with pansharpened SPOT 6 data alone amounted to 71.3%. Higher accuracies were reached via the additional integration of SWIR bands (overall accuracy = 73.21%), especially for complex small-scale land cover types such as shrubby areas. This helped to reach a high accuracy in the habitat models. Abundances of the three studied bird species were closely linked to the proportion of wetland, willow shrubs, and habitat heterogeneity. Habitat requirements and population sizes of species of interest are valuable information for stakeholders and decision-makers to maximize the potential success of habitat management measures.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (16) ◽  
pp. 1927 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoxue Wang ◽  
Xiangwei Gao ◽  
Yuanzhi Zhang ◽  
Xianyun Fei ◽  
Zhou Chen ◽  
...  

Wetlands are one of the world’s most important ecosystems, playing an important role in regulating climate and protecting the environment. However, human activities have changed the land cover of wetlands, leading to direct destruction of the environment. If wetlands are to be protected, their land cover must be classified and changes to it monitored using remote sensing technology. The random forest (RF) machine learning algorithm, which offers clear advantages (e.g., processing feature data without feature selection and preferable classification result) for high spatial image classification, has been used in many study areas. In this research, to verify the effectiveness of this algorithm for remote sensing image classification of coastal wetlands, two types of spatial resolution images of the Linhong Estuary wetland in Lianyungang—Worldview-2 and Landsat-8 images—were used for land cover classification using the RF method. To demonstrate the preferable classification accuracy of the RF algorithm, the support vector machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) methods were also used to classify the same area of land cover for comparison with the results of RF classification. The study results showed that (1) the overall accuracy of the RF method reached 91.86%, higher than the SVM and k-NN methods by 4.68% and 4.72%, respectively, for Worldview-2 images; (2) at the same time, the classification accuracies of RF, SVM, and k-NN were 86.61%, 79.96%, and 77.23%, respectively, for Landsat-8 images; (3) for some land cover types having only a small number of samples, the RF algorithm also achieved better classification results using Worldview-2 and Landsat-8 images, and (4) the addition texture features could improve the classification accuracy of the RF method when using Worldview-2 images. Research indicated that high-resolution remote sensing images are more suitable for small-scale land cover classification image and that the RF algorithm can provide better classification accuracy and is more suitable for coastal wetland classification than the SVM and k-NN algorithms are.


Geosciences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 312
Author(s):  
Barbara Wiatkowska ◽  
Janusz Słodczyk ◽  
Aleksandra Stokowska

Urban expansion is a dynamic and complex phenomenon, often involving adverse changes in land use and land cover (LULC). This paper uses satellite imagery from Landsat-5 TM, Landsat-8 OLI, Sentinel-2 MSI, and GIS technology to analyse LULC changes in 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020. The research was carried out in Opole, the capital of the Opole Agglomeration (south-western Poland). Maps produced from supervised spectral classification of remote sensing data revealed that in 20 years, built-up areas have increased about 40%, mainly at the expense of agricultural land. Detection of changes in the spatial pattern of LULC showed that the highest average rate of increase in built-up areas occurred in the zone 3–6 km (11.7%) and above 6 km (10.4%) from the centre of Opole. The analysis of the increase of built-up land in relation to the decreasing population (SDG 11.3.1) has confirmed the ongoing process of demographic suburbanisation. The paper shows that satellite imagery and GIS can be a valuable tool for local authorities and planners to monitor the scale of urbanisation processes for the purpose of adapting space management procedures to the changing environment.


Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 231
Author(s):  
Can Trong Nguyen ◽  
Amnat Chidthaisong ◽  
Phan Kieu Diem ◽  
Lian-Zhi Huo

Bare soil is a critical element in the urban landscape and plays an essential role in urban environments. Yet, the separation of bare soil and other land cover types using remote sensing techniques remains a significant challenge. There are several remote sensing-based spectral indices for barren detection, but their effectiveness varies depending on land cover patterns and climate conditions. Within this research, we introduced a modified bare soil index (MBI) using shortwave infrared (SWIR) and near-infrared (NIR) wavelengths derived from Landsat 8 (OLI—Operational Land Imager). The proposed bare soil index was tested in two different bare soil patterns in Thailand and Vietnam, where there are large areas of bare soil during the agricultural fallow period, obstructing the separation between bare soil and urban areas. Bare soil extracted from the MBI achieved higher overall accuracy of about 98% and a kappa coefficient over 0.96, compared to bare soil index (BSI), normalized different bare soil index (NDBaI), and dry bare soil index (DBSI). The results also revealed that MBI considerably contributes to the accuracy of land cover classification. We suggest using the MBI for bare soil detection in tropical climatic regions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 197
Author(s):  
Debbie Chamberlain ◽  
Stuart Phinn ◽  
Hugh Possingham

Great Barrier Reef catchments are under pressure from the effects of climate change, landscape modifications, and hydrology alterations. With the use of remote sensing datasets covering large areas, conventional methods of change detection can expose broad transitions, whereas workflows that excerpt data for time-series trends divulge more subtle transformations of land cover modification. Here, we combine both these approaches to investigate change and trends in a large estuarine region of Central Queensland, Australia, that encompasses a national park and is adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage site. Nine information classes were compiled in a maximum likelihood post classification change analysis in 2004–2017. Mangroves decreased (1146 hectares), as was the case with estuarine wetland (1495 hectares), and saltmarsh grass (1546 hectares). The overall classification accuracies and Kappa coefficient for 2004, 2006, 2009, 2013, 2015, and 2017 land cover maps were 85%, 88%, 88%, 89%, 81%, and 92%, respectively. The cumulative area of open forest, estuarine wetland, and saltmarsh grass (1628 hectares) was converted to pasture in a thematic change analysis showing the “from–to” change. We generated linear regression relationships to examine trends in pixel values across the time series. Our findings from a trend analysis showed a decreasing trend (p value range = 0.001–0.099) in the vegetation extent of open forest, fringing mangroves, estuarine wetlands, saltmarsh grass, and grazing areas, but this was inconsistent across the study site. Similar to reports from tropical regions elsewhere, saltmarsh grass is poorly represented in the national park. A severe tropical cyclone preceding the capture of the 2017 Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) image was likely the main driver for reduced areas of shoreline and stream vegetation. Our research contributes to the body of knowledge on coastal ecosystem dynamics to enable planning to achieve more effective conservation outcomes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 1263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yingfei Xiong ◽  
Shanxin Guo ◽  
Jinsong Chen ◽  
Xinping Deng ◽  
Luyi Sun ◽  
...  

Detailed and accurate information on the spatial variation of land cover and land use is a critical component of local ecology and environmental research. For these tasks, high spatial resolution images are required. Considering the trade-off between high spatial and high temporal resolution in remote sensing images, many learning-based models (e.g., Convolutional neural network, sparse coding, Bayesian network) have been established to improve the spatial resolution of coarse images in both the computer vision and remote sensing fields. However, data for training and testing in these learning-based methods are usually limited to a certain location and specific sensor, resulting in the limited ability to generalize the model across locations and sensors. Recently, generative adversarial nets (GANs), a new learning model from the deep learning field, show many advantages for capturing high-dimensional nonlinear features over large samples. In this study, we test whether the GAN method can improve the generalization ability across locations and sensors with some modification to accomplish the idea “training once, apply to everywhere and different sensors” for remote sensing images. This work is based on super-resolution generative adversarial nets (SRGANs), where we modify the loss function and the structure of the network of SRGANs and propose the improved SRGAN (ISRGAN), which makes model training more stable and enhances the generalization ability across locations and sensors. In the experiment, the training and testing data were collected from two sensors (Landsat 8 OLI and Chinese GF 1) from different locations (Guangdong and Xinjiang in China). For the cross-location test, the model was trained in Guangdong with the Chinese GF 1 (8 m) data to be tested with the GF 1 data in Xinjiang. For the cross-sensor test, the same model training in Guangdong with GF 1 was tested in Landsat 8 OLI images in Xinjiang. The proposed method was compared with the neighbor-embedding (NE) method, the sparse representation method (SCSR), and the SRGAN. The peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM) were chosen for the quantitive assessment. The results showed that the ISRGAN is superior to the NE (PSNR: 30.999, SSIM: 0.944) and SCSR (PSNR: 29.423, SSIM: 0.876) methods, and the SRGAN (PSNR: 31.378, SSIM: 0.952), with the PSNR = 35.816 and SSIM = 0.988 in the cross-location test. A similar result was seen in the cross-sensor test. The ISRGAN had the best result (PSNR: 38.092, SSIM: 0.988) compared to the NE (PSNR: 35.000, SSIM: 0.982) and SCSR (PSNR: 33.639, SSIM: 0.965) methods, and the SRGAN (PSNR: 32.820, SSIM: 0.949). Meanwhile, we also tested the accuracy improvement for land cover classification before and after super-resolution by the ISRGAN. The results show that the accuracy of land cover classification after super-resolution was significantly improved, in particular, the impervious surface class (the road and buildings with high-resolution texture) improved by 15%.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (24) ◽  
pp. 3000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Alonso-Sarria ◽  
Carmen Valdivieso-Ros ◽  
Francisco Gomariz-Castillo

Supervised land cover classification from remote sensing imagery is based on gathering a set of training areas to characterise each of the classes and to train a predictive model that is then used to predict land cover in the rest of the image. This procedure relies mainly on the assumptions of statistical separability of the classes and the representativeness of the training areas. This paper uses isolation forests, a type of random tree ensembles, to analyse both assumptions and to easily correct lack of representativeness by digitising new training areas where needed to improve the classification of a Landsat-8 set of images with Random Forest. The results show that the improved set of training areas after the isolation forest analysis is more representative of the whole image and increases classification accuracy. Besides, the distribution of isolation values can be useful to estimate class separability. A class separability parameter that summarises such distributions is proposed. This parameter is more correlated to omission and commission errors than other separability measures such as the Jeffries–Matusita distance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-27
Author(s):  
Saleha Jamal ◽  
Md Ashif Ali

Wetlands are often called as biological “supermarket” and “kidneys of the landscape” due to their multiple functions, including water purification, water storage, processing of carbon and other nutrients, stabilization of shorelines and support of aquatic lives. Unfortunately, although being dynamic and productive ecosystem, these wetlands have been affected by human induced land use changes. India is losing wetlands at the rate of 2 to 3 per cent each year due to over-population, direct deforestation, urban encroachment, over fishing, irrigation and agriculture etc (Prasher, 2018). The present study tries to investigate the nature and degree of land use/land cover transformation, their causes and resultant effects on Chatra Wetland. To fulfil the purpose of the study, GIS and remote sensing techniques have been employed. Satellite imageries have been used from United States Geological Survey (USGS) Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper plus and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager for the year 2003 and 2018. Cloud free imageries of 2003 and 2018 have been downloaded from USGS (https://glovis.usgs.gov/) for the month of March and April respectively. Image processing, supervised classificationhas been done in ArcGis 10.5 and ERDAS IMAGINE 14. The study reveals that the settlement hasincreased by about 90.43 per cent in the last 15 years around the Chatra wetland within the bufferzone of 2 Sq km. Similarly agriculture, vegetation, water body, swamp and wasteland witnessed asignificant decrease by 5.94 per cent, 57.69 per cent, 26.64 per cent 4.52 per cent and 55.27 per centrespectively from 2003 to 2018.


Author(s):  
Ajagbe, Abeeb Babajide ◽  
Oguntade, Sodiq Solagbade ◽  
Abiade, Idunnu Temitope

Land use assessment and land cover transition need remote sensing (RS) and geographic information systems (GIS). Land use/land cover changes of Ado-Ekiti Local Government Area, Ekiti State, Nigeria, were examined in this research. Landsat 5 TM, Landsat 7 ETM+ and Landsat 8 OLI were acquired for 1985, 2000, and 2015 respectively. Image scene with path 190 and row 055 was used for the three Landsat Images. A supervised digital image classification approach was used in the study, which was carried out using the ArcMap 10.4 Software. Five land use/land cover categories were recognised and recorded as polygons, including Built-up Areas, Bare surface, water body, Dense Vegetation and Sparse Vegetation. The variations in the area covered by the various polygons were measured in hectares. This study revealed that between 1985 and 2015, there was a significant change in Built-up areas from 1694 hectares to 5656 hectares. However, there was a reduction in water body from 25 hectares in 1985 to 19 hectares in 2015; there was a severe reduction in the bare surface from 4641 hectares in 1985 to 2237 hectares in 2015. Generally, the findings show that the number of people building houses in the study area has grown over time, as many people reside in the outskirts of the Local Government Area, resulting in a decrease in the vegetation and bare surfaces. The maps created in this research will be useful to the Ekiti State Ministry of Land, Housing, Physical Planning, and Urban Development to develop strategies and government policies to benefit people living in the Ado-Ekiti Local Government Area of the State.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document