scholarly journals Automated Inundation Mapping Over Large Areas Using Landsat Data and Google Earth Engine

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 1348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria L. Inman ◽  
Mitchell B. Lyons
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Aquatic Vegetation ◽  
Landsat Imagery ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Okavango Delta ◽  
Infrared Band ◽  
Inundation Maps ◽  
Noaa Avhrr ◽  
Inundation Mapping ◽  
Google Earth Engine

Accurate inundation maps for flooded wetlands and rivers are a critical resource for their management and conservation. In this paper, we automate a method (thresholding of the short-wave infrared band) for classifying peak inundation in the Okavango Delta, northern Botswana, using Landsat imagery and Google Earth Engine. Inundation classification in the Okavango Delta is complex owing to the spectral overlap between inundated areas covered with aquatic vegetation and dryland vegetation classes on satellite imagery, and classifications have predominately been implemented on broad spatial resolution imagery. We present the longest time series to date (1990–2019) of inundation maps for the peak flood season at a high spatial resolution (30 m) for the Okavango Delta. We validated the maps using image-based and in situ data accuracy assessments, with overall accuracy ranging from 91.5% to 98.1%. Use of Landsat imagery resulted in consistently lower (on average, 692 km2) estimates of inundation extent than previous studies that used Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Advanced Very-High-Resolution Radiometer (NOAA AVHRR) imagery, likely owing to the increased number of mixed pixels that occur when using broad spatial resolution imagery, which can lead to overestimations of the size of inundated areas. We provide the inundation maps and Google Earth Engine code for public use. This classification method can likely be adapted for inundation mapping in other regions.

scholarly journals Automated Inundation History Mapping over Large Areas using Landsat and Google Earth Engine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria L Inman ◽  
Mitchell B Lyons
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Aquatic Vegetation ◽  
Landsat Imagery ◽  
Short Wave ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Okavango Delta ◽  
Complex Case ◽  
Infrared Band ◽  
Inundation Maps ◽  
Google Earth Engine

Accurate inundation maps for flooded wetlands and rivers are a critical resource for their management and conservation. In this paper we automate a method (thresholding of the short-wave infrared band) for classifying inundation, using Landsat imagery and Google Earth Engine. We demonstrate the method in the Okavango Delta, northern Botswana, a complex case study due to the spectral overlap between inundated areas covered with aquatic vegetation and dryland vegetation classes on satellite imagery. Inundation classifications in the Okavango Delta have predominately been implemented on broad spatial resolution images. We present the longest time series to date (1990-2019) of inundation maps at high spatial resolution (30m) for the Okavango Delta. We validated the maps using image-based and in situ data accuracy assessments, with accuracy ranging from 91.5 - 98.1%. Use of Landsat imagery resulted in consistently lower estimates of inundation extent than previous studies, likely due to the increased number of mixed pixels that occur when using broad spatial resolution imagery, which can lead to overestimations of the size of inundated areas. We provide the inundation maps and Google Earth Engine code for public use.

National-scale mangrove forest mapping by using Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 MSI imagery on the Google Earth Engine Platform

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luojia Hu ◽  
Wei Yao ◽  
Zhitong Yu ◽  
Lei Wang
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Mangrove Forest ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Landsat Imagery ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Accuracy Evaluation ◽  
Mangrove Forests ◽  
Forest Mapping ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Sentinel 2

<p>Mangrove forest is considered as one of the pivotal ecosystems to near-shore environment health, adjacent terrestrial ecosystems and even global climate change migration. However, for past two decades, they are declining rapidly. In order to take effective steps to prevent the extinction of mangroves, high spatial resolution information of large-scale mangrove distribution is urgent. Recent study has indicated that a suitable pixel size for extracting mangroves should be at least equal to 10 m. Hence, Sentinel imagery (Sentinel-1 C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and Sentinel-2 Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) imagery) whose spatial resolution is 10 m may hold great potentials to achieve this goal, but there are limited researches investigating it. Therefore, in this study, we will explore the potential of Sentinel imagery to extract mangrove forests in China on the Google Earth Engine platform. Specifically, our study was mainly conducted around 3 questions: (1) Which Sentinel imagery provides a higher accuracy for mangrove forest mapping, Sentinel-1 SAR data or Sentinel-2 multi-spectral data? (2) which combination of features from Sentinel imagery provides the most accurate mangrove forest map? (3) Compared to 30-m resolution mangrove products derived from Landsat imagery, how does 10-m resolution map improve our knowledge about the distribution of mangrove forest in China?</p><p> </p><p>Our results show that: (1) The highest producer’s accuracies (the reason why using producer’s accuracy as an accuracy evaluation indicator here is that the omission errors in mangrove forest extent map are much larger than commission errors) of mangrove forest maps derived from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery are 91.76% and 90.39%, respectively, which means that the contributions of Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 MSI imagery to mangrove mapping are similar; (2) The highest producer’s accuracy of mangrove forest map at 10-m resolution is 95.4%. The mangrove forest map with the highest accuracy is obtained by combining quantiles of spectral and backscatter bands, spectral index, and texture index derived from time series of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery, indicating that the combination of Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 MSI imagery is more useful in mangrove forest mapping than using them separately; (3) In China, the total area of mangrove forest extent at 10-m resolution is similar to that at 30-m resolution (20003 ha vs. 19220 ha). However, compared to 30-m resolution mangrove products, the 10-m resolution mangrove map identifies 1741 ha (occupying 8.7% of total mangrove forest area in China) mangrove forests in size smaller than 1 ha, which are especially important to low-lying coastal zone. This study demonstrates the feasibility of Sentinel imagery in large-scale mangrove forest mapping and gives guidance to map global mangrove forest at 10-m resolution in the future.  </p><p> </p>

scholarly journals Advancing the Mapping of Mangrove Forests at National-Scale Using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 Time-Series Data with Google Earth Engine: A Case Study in China

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (19) ◽  
pp. 3120
Author(s):  
Luojia Hu ◽  
Nan Xu ◽  
Jian Liang ◽  
Zhichao Li ◽  
Luzhen Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Mangrove Forest ◽  
Time Series Data ◽  
Landsat Imagery ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Series Data ◽  
National Scale ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Sentinel 2

A high resolution mangrove map (e.g., 10-m), including mangrove patches with small size, is urgently needed for mangrove protection and ecosystem function estimation, because more small mangrove patches have disappeared with influence of human disturbance and sea-level rise. However, recent national-scale mangrove forest maps are mainly derived from 30-m Landsat imagery, and their spatial resolution is relatively coarse to accurately characterize the extent of mangroves, especially those with small size. Now, Sentinel imagery with 10-m resolution provides an opportunity for generating high-resolution mangrove maps containing these small mangrove patches. Here, we used spectral/backscatter-temporal variability metrics (quantiles) derived from Sentinel-1 SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) and/or Sentinel-2 MSI (Multispectral Instrument) time-series imagery as input features of random forest to classify mangroves in China. We found that Sentinel-2 (F1-Score of 0.895) is more effective than Sentinel-1 (F1-score of 0.88) in mangrove extraction, and a combination of SAR and MSI imagery can get the best accuracy (F1-score of 0.94). The 10-m mangrove map was derived by combining SAR and MSI data, which identified 20003 ha mangroves in China, and the area of small mangrove patches (<1 ha) is 1741 ha, occupying 8.7% of the whole mangrove area. At the province level, Guangdong has the largest area (819 ha) of small mangrove patches, and in Fujian, the percentage of small mangrove patches is the highest (11.4%). A comparison with existing 30-m mangrove products showed noticeable disagreement, indicating the necessity for generating mangrove extent product with 10-m resolution. This study demonstrates the significant potential of using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 images to produce an accurate and high-resolution mangrove forest map with Google Earth Engine (GEE). The mangrove forest map is expected to provide critical information to conservation managers, scientists, and other stakeholders in monitoring the dynamics of the mangrove forest.

scholarly journals Flood inundation mapping- Kerala 2018; Harnessing the power of SAR, automatic threshold detection method and Google Earth Engine

PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (8) ◽  
pp. e0237324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Varun Tiwari ◽  
Vinay Kumar ◽  
Mir Abdul Matin ◽  
Amrit Thapa ◽  
Walter Lee Ellenburg ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Detection Method ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Flood Inundation ◽  
Threshold Detection ◽  
Inundation Mapping ◽  
Flood Inundation Mapping ◽  
Google Earth Engine

scholarly journals Crop Area Mapping in Southern and Central Malawi With Google Earth Engine

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Peterson ◽  
Greg Husak
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Test Data ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
High Temporal Resolution ◽  
Smallholder Farms ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Crop Area ◽  
Sentinel 2

Agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa consists primarily of smallholder farms of rainfed crops. Historically, satellite data were too coarse to account for the heterogeneity in these landscapes. Sentinel-2 data have improved spectral resolution and much higher spatial resolution (10 m) than previously available satellites with global coverage, such as Landsat or MODIS, making mapping smallholder farms possible. Spectral mixture analysis was used to convert the Sentinel-2 signal into fractions of green vegetation, non-photosynthetic vegetation, soil, and shade endmembers. Very high spatial resolution imagery in Google Earth Pro was used to identify locations of crop and natural vegetation classes, with over 20,000 reference points interpreted. The high temporal resolution of Sentinel-2 (5 days repeat) allows for classification of landcover based on the phenological signal, with natural areas having smoothly varying amounts of photosynthetic vegetation annually, while cropped areas show more abrupt changes, and also the presence of bare soil due to agricultural activity at some point during the year. We summarized the endmember values using monthly medians, extracted values for the reference data points, randomly split them into training and test data sets, and input the training data into the random forests algorithm in Google Earth Engine to map crop area. We divided southern and central Malawi into tiles, and found crop/no crop classification accuracies on the test data for each tile to be between 87 and 93%. The 10 m map of crop area was aggregated to the district level and showed an R2 of 0.74 with ground-based statistics from the Malawi government and 0.79 with a remotely sensed product developed by the USGS.

scholarly journals GISD30: global 30-m impervious surface dynamic dataset from 1985 to 2020 using time-series Landsat imagery on the Google Earth Engine platform

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiao Zhang ◽  
Liangyun Liu ◽  
Tingting Zhao ◽  
Yuan Gao ◽  
Xidong Chen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Landsat Imagery ◽  
Impervious Surface ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Reflectance Spectra ◽  
Impervious Surfaces ◽  
Surface Dynamics ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Surface Dynamic ◽  
Spatiotemporal Consistency

Abstract. Accurately mapping impervious surface dynamics has great scientific significance and application value for urban sustainable development research, anthropogenic carbon emission assessment and global ecological environment modeling. In this study, a novel and accurate global 30 m impervious surface dynamic dataset (GISD30) for 1985 to 2020 was produced using the spectral generalization method and time-series Landsat imagery, on the Google Earth Engine cloud-computing platform. Firstly, the global training samples and corresponding reflectance spectra were automatically derived from prior global 30 m land-cover products after employing the multitemporal compositing method and relative radiometric normalization. Then, spatiotemporal adaptive classification models, trained with the migrated reflectance spectra of impervious surfaces from 2020 and pervious surface samples in the same epoch for each 5° × 5° geographical tile, were applied to map the impervious surface in each period. Furthermore, a spatiotemporal consistency correction method was presented to minimize the effects of independent classification errors and improve the spatiotemporal consistency of impervious surface dynamics. Our global 30 m impervious surface dynamic model achieved an overall accuracy of 91.5 % and a kappa coefficient of 0.866 using 18,540 global time-series validation samples. Cross-comparisons with four existing global 30 m impervious surface products further indicated that our GISD30 dynamic product achieved the best performance in capturing the spatial distributions and spatiotemporal dynamics of impervious surfaces in various impervious landscapes. The statistical results indicated that the global impervious surface has doubled in the past 35 years, from 5.116 × 105 km2 in 1985 to 10.871 × 105 km2 in 2020, and Asia saw the largest increase in impervious surface area compared to other continents, with a total increase of 2.946 × 105 km2. Therefore, it was concluded that our global 30 m impervious surface dynamic dataset is an accurate and promising product, and could provide vital support in monitoring regional or global urbanization as well as in related applications. The global 30 m impervious surface dynamic dataset from 1985 to 2020 generated in this paper is free to access at http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5220816 (Liu et al., 2021b).

scholarly journals Long Term Monitoring of Ghana’s Forest Reserves Using Google Earth Engine

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Dacosta Osei ◽  
S. A. Andam-Akorful ◽  
Edward Matthew Osei jnr
Keyword(s):  
Structural Changes ◽  
Forest Cover ◽  
Anthropogenic Activities ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Forest Monitoring ◽  
Forest Reserves ◽  
Deforestation Rate ◽  
Noaa Avhrr ◽  
Forestry Commission ◽  
Google Earth Engine

Farm activities continued sand winning operations and the allocation of plots of land to prospective developers in Ghana pose a serious threat to the forest covers and lifespan of the Forest and game reserves. With all the positive add ups to the country from forests, Ghana has lost more than 33.7%(equivalent to 2,500,000 hectares) of its forest, since the early 1990s between 2005 and 2010, the rate of deforestation in Ghana was estimated at 2.19% per annum; the sixth highest deforestation rate globally for that period. This shows how important forest monitoring can be to the forestry commission in Ghana. Despite the frameworks which have been developed to help Ghana to protect and restore its forest resources, inadequate monitoring systems remain a barrier to effective implementation. In this study, Google earth engine was used to map and analyze the structural changes of forest cover using JavaScript to query and compute Landsat, MODIS and NOAA AVHRR satellite imageries of the study area (Ghana) with spatial resolutions 30m, 250m and 7km respectively. A supervised classification was performed on three multi-temporal satellite imageries and a total of six major land use and land cover classes were identified and mapped. By using random Forest-classification technique, from 1985 to 2018 recorded by NOAA AVHRR, forest cover has decreased by 66% and 2000 to 2018 recorded by Landsat and MODIS 61% and 47% respectively. A decrease in the forest has been as a result of anthropogenic activities in Ghana. A change detection analysis was performed on these images and it was noted that Ghana is losing forest reserves in every 5years. Overlay of the reserved forest of the 2000 and the classified map of 2018 shows vegetation changed during 2000-2018 remarkably. Therefore, forest-related institutions like the Forestry Commission can employ and use this monitoring system on Google Earth Engine for processing satellite images particularly Landsat, MODIS and NOAA AVHRR for forest cover monitoring and analysis for fast, efficient and reliable results.

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