scholarly journals Improved Remote Sensing Methods to Detect Northern Wild Rice (Zizania palustris L.)

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (18) ◽  
pp. 3023
Author(s):  
Kristen O’Shea ◽  
Jillian LaRoe ◽  
Anthony Vorster ◽  
Nicholas Young ◽  
Paul Evangelista ◽  
...  

Declining populations of Zizania palustris L. (northern wildrice, or wildrice) during the last century drives the demand for new and innovative techniques to support monitoring of this culturally and ecologically significant crop wild relative. We trained three wildrice detection models in R and Google Earth Engine using data from annual aquatic vegetation surveys in northern Minnesota. Three different training datasets, varying in the definition of wildrice presence, were combined with Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Sentinel-1 C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery to map wildrice in 2015 using random forests. Spectral predictors were derived from phenologically important time periods of emergence (June–July) and peak harvest (August–September). The range of the Vertical Vertical (VV) polarization between the two time periods was consistently the top predictor. Model outputs were evaluated using both point and area-based validation (polygon). While all models performed well in the point validation with percent correctly classified ranging from 83.8% to 91.1%, we found polygon validation necessary to comprehensively assess wildrice detection accuracy. Our practical approach highlights a variety of applications that can be applied to guide field excursions and estimate the extent of occurrence at landscape scales. Further testing and validation of the methods we present may support multiyear monitoring which is foundational for the preservation of wildrice for future generations.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (24) ◽  
pp. 4021
Author(s):  
Geethen Singh ◽  
Chevonne Reynolds ◽  
Marcus Byrne ◽  
Benjamin Rosman

Diverse freshwater biological communities are threatened by invasive aquatic alien plant (IAAP) invasions and consequently, cost countries millions to manage. The effective management of these IAAP invasions necessitates their frequent and reliable monitoring across a broad extent and over a long-term. Here, we introduce and apply a monitoring approach that meet these criteria and is based on a three-stage hierarchical classification to firstly detect water, then aquatic vegetation and finally water hyacinth (Pontederia crassipes, previously Eichhornia crassipes), the most damaging IAAP species within many regions of the world. Our approach circumvents many challenges that restricted previous satellite-based water hyacinth monitoring attempts to smaller study areas. The method is executable on Google Earth Engine (GEE) extemporaneously and utilizes free, medium resolution (10–30 m) multispectral Earth Observation (EO) data from either Landsat-8 or Sentinel-2. The automated workflow employs a novel simple thresholding approach to obtain reliable boundaries for open-water, which are then used to limit the area for aquatic vegetation detection. Subsequently, a random forest modelling approach is used to discriminate water hyacinth from other detected aquatic vegetation using the eight most important variables. This study represents the first national scale EO-derived water hyacinth distribution map. Based on our model, it is estimated that this pervasive IAAP covered 417.74 km2 across South Africa in 2013. Additionally, we show encouraging results for utilizing the automatically derived aquatic vegetation masks to fit and evaluate a convolutional neural network-based semantic segmentation model, removing the need for detection of surface water extents that may not always be available at the required spatio-temporal resolution or accuracy. The water hyacinth species discrimination has a 0.80, or greater, overall accuracy (0.93), F1-score (0.87) and Matthews correlation coefficient (0.80) based on 98 widely distributed field sites across South Africa. The results suggest that the introduced workflow is suitable for monitoring changes in the extent of open water, aquatic vegetation, and water hyacinth for individual waterbodies or across national extents. The GEE code can be accessed here.


Author(s):  
Thiago Quinaia ◽  
Renato Valle Junior ◽  
Victor Coelho ◽  
Rafael Cunha ◽  
Carlos Valera ◽  
...  

Inadequate pasture management causes land degradation and negative impacts on the socio-economic development of agricultural regions. Given the importance for Brazil and the World of pasture-based livestock production, the recognition of pasture degradation is essential. The use of remote sensing satellite systems to detect degraded pastures increased in the recent past, because of their capability to survey large portions of Earth’s surface. A struggle nowadays is to improve detection accuracy and to implement high-resolution surveys at farmland scale using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The satellite sensors capture reflectance from the visible spectrum and near infrared bands, which allows estimating plant’s vigor vegetation indices. The NDVI is a widely accepted index, but to generate an NDVI map using a UAV a relatively high-cost multispectral sensor is required, while most UAVs are equipped with low-cost RGB cameras. In the present study, a script developed on the Google Earth Engine image-processing platform manipulated images from the Landsat 8 satellite, and compared the performances of NDVI and an improved color index that we coined “Total Brightness Quotient” of red (TBQR), green (TBQG) and blue (TBQB) bands. An efficient detection of pasture degradation using the TBQs would be a good prognosis for the surveys at farm scale where environmental authorities are progressively using UAVs and forcing landowners towards pasture restoration. When compared to NDVI, the TBQG showed a correlation of 0.965 and an accuracy of 88.63%. Thus, the TBQG proved as efficient as the NDVI in the diagnosis of degraded pastures.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 2299
Author(s):  
Andrea Tassi ◽  
Daniela Gigante ◽  
Giuseppe Modica ◽  
Luciano Di Martino ◽  
Marco Vizzari

With the general objective of producing a 2018–2020 Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) map of the Maiella National Park (central Italy), useful for a future long-term LULC change analysis, this research aimed to develop a Landsat 8 (L8) data composition and classification process using Google Earth Engine (GEE). In this process, we compared two pixel-based (PB) and two object-based (OB) approaches, assessing the advantages of integrating the textural information in the PB approach. Moreover, we tested the possibility of using the L8 panchromatic band to improve the segmentation step and the object’s textural analysis of the OB approach and produce a 15-m resolution LULC map. After selecting the best time window of the year to compose the base data cube, we applied a cloud-filtering and a topography-correction process on the 32 available L8 surface reflectance images. On this basis, we calculated five spectral indices, some of them on an interannual basis, to account for vegetation seasonality. We added an elevation, an aspect, a slope layer, and the 2018 CORINE Land Cover classification layer to improve the available information. We applied the Gray-Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM) algorithm to calculate the image’s textural information and, in the OB approaches, the Simple Non-Iterative Clustering (SNIC) algorithm for the image segmentation step. We performed an initial RF optimization process finding the optimal number of decision trees through out-of-bag error analysis. We randomly distributed 1200 ground truth points and used 70% to train the RF classifier and 30% for the validation phase. This subdivision was randomly and recursively redefined to evaluate the performance of the tested approaches more robustly. The OB approaches performed better than the PB ones when using the 15 m L8 panchromatic band, while the addition of textural information did not improve the PB approach. Using the panchromatic band within an OB approach, we produced a detailed, 15-m resolution LULC map of the study area.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 2193
Author(s):  
Deepakrishna Somasundaram ◽  
Fangfang Zhang ◽  
Sisira Ediriweera ◽  
Shenglei Wang ◽  
Ziyao Yin ◽  
...  

Addressing inland water transparency and driver effects to ensure the sustainability and provision of good quality water in Sri Lanka has been a timely prerequisite, especially under the Sustainable Development Goals 2030 agenda. Natural and anthropogenic changes lead to significant variations in water quality in the country. Therefore, an urgent need has emerged to understand the variability, spatiotemporal patterns, changing trends and impact of drivers on transparency, which are unclear to date. This study used all available Landsat 8 images from 2013 to 2020 and a quasi-analytical approach to assess the spatiotemporal Secchi disk depth (ZSD) variability of 550 reservoirs and its relationship with natural (precipitation, wind and temperature) and anthropogenic (human activity and population density) drivers. ZSD varied from 9.68 cm to 199.47 with an average of 64.71 cm and 93% of reservoirs had transparency below 100 cm. Overall, slightly increasing trends were shown in the annual mean ZSD. Notable intra-annual variations were also indicating the highest and lowest ZSD during the north-east monsoon and south-west monsoon, respectively. The highest ZSD was found in wet zone reservoirs, while dry zone showed the least. All of the drivers were significantly affecting the water transparency in the entire island. The combined impact of natural factors on ZSD changes was more significant (77.70%) than anthropogenic variables, whereas, specifically, human activity accounted for the highest variability across all climatic zones. The findings of this study provide the first comprehensive estimation of the ZSD of entire reservoirs and driver contribution and also provides essential information for future sustainable water management and conservation strategies.


Author(s):  
X. Shi ◽  
L. Lu ◽  
S. Yang ◽  
G. Huang ◽  
Z. Zhao

For wide application of change detection with SAR imagery, current processing technologies and methods are mostly based on pixels. It is difficult for pixel-based technologies to utilize spatial characteristics of images and topological relations of objects. Object-oriented technology takes objects as processing unit, which takes advantage of the shape and texture information of image. It can greatly improve the efficiency and reliability of change detection. Recently, with the development of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR), more backscattering features on different polarization state can be available for usage of object-oriented change detection study. In this paper, the object-oriented strategy will be employed. Considering the fact that the different target or target's state behaves different backscattering characteristics dependent on polarization state, an object-oriented change detection method that based on weighted polarimetric scattering difference of PolSAR images is proposed. The method operates on the objects generated by generalized statistical region merging (GSRM) segmentation processing. The merit of GSRM method is that image segmentation is executed on polarimetric coherence matrix, which takes full advantages of polarimetric backscattering features. And then, the measurement of polarimetric scattering difference is constructed by combining the correlation of covariance matrix and the difference of scattering power. Through analysing the effects of the covariance matrix correlation and the scattering echo power difference on the polarimetric scattering difference, the weighted method is used to balance the influences caused by the two parts, so that more reasonable weights can be chosen to decrease the false alarm rate. The effectiveness of the algorithm that proposed in this letter is tested by detection of the growth of crops with two different temporal radarsat-2 fully PolSAR data. First, objects are produced by GSRM algorithm based on the coherent matrix in the pre-processing. Then, the corresponding patches are extracted in two temporal images to measure the differences of objects. To detect changes of patches, a difference map is created by means of weighted polarization scattering difference. Finally, the result of change detection can be obtained by threshold determining. The experiments show that this approach is feasible and effective, and a reasonable choice of weights can improve the detection accuracy significantly.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 4683
Author(s):  
Masoumeh Aghababaei ◽  
Ataollah Ebrahimi ◽  
Ali Asghar Naghipour ◽  
Esmaeil Asadi ◽  
Jochem Verrelst

Vegetation Types (VTs) are important managerial units, and their identification serves as essential tools for the conservation of land covers. Despite a long history of Earth observation applications to assess and monitor land covers, the quantitative detection of sparse VTs remains problematic, especially in arid and semiarid areas. This research aimed to identify appropriate multi-temporal datasets to improve the accuracy of VTs classification in a heterogeneous landscape in Central Zagros, Iran. To do so, first the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) temporal profile of each VT was identified in the study area for the period of 2018, 2019, and 2020. This data revealed strong seasonal phenological patterns and key periods of VTs separation. It led us to select the optimal time series images to be used in the VTs classification. We then compared single-date and multi-temporal datasets of Landsat 8 images within the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform as the input to the Random Forest classifier for VTs detection. The single-date classification gave a median Overall Kappa (OK) and Overall Accuracy (OA) of 51% and 64%, respectively. Instead, using multi-temporal images led to an overall kappa accuracy of 74% and an overall accuracy of 81%. Thus, the exploitation of multi-temporal datasets favored accurate VTs classification. In addition, the presented results underline that available open access cloud-computing platforms such as the GEE facilitates identifying optimal periods and multitemporal imagery for VTs classification.


Author(s):  
Guoqing Zhou ◽  
Xiang Zhou ◽  
Tao Yue ◽  
Yilong Liu

This paper presents a method which combines the traditional threshold method and SVM method, to detect the cloud of Landsat-8 images. The proposed method is implemented using DSP for real-time cloud detection. The DSP platform connects with emulator and personal computer. The threshold method is firstly utilized to obtain a coarse cloud detection result, and then the SVM classifier is used to obtain high accuracy of cloud detection. More than 200 cloudy images from Lansat-8 were experimented to test the proposed method. Comparing the proposed method with SVM method, it is demonstrated that the cloud detection accuracy of each image using the proposed algorithm is higher than those of SVM algorithm. The results of the experiment demonstrate that the implementation of the proposed method on DSP can effectively realize the real-time cloud detection accurately.


Nativa ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luís Flávio Pereira ◽  
Cecilia Fátima Carlos Ferreira ◽  
Ricardo Morato Fiúza Guimarães

Pastagens sob práticas de manejo ineficientes tornam-se degradadas, provocando sérios problemas socioambientais e econômicos. Assim, entender a dinâmica dos sistemas pastoris e suas interações com o meio físico torna-se essencial na busca de alternativas sustentáveis para a agropecuária. Estudou-se manejo, dinâmica anual e interações socioambientais em pastagens de uma bacia hidrográfica no bioma Mata Atlântica em Minas Gerais, Brasil, durante o ano hidrológico 2016/2017. Utilizou-se dados de campo, relatos de agricultores e sensoriamento remoto via imagens LANDSAT 8 OLI e Google Earth Pro®. Foi proposto um índice de qualidade para pastagens da região. As pastagens apresentaram, em média, qualidade moderada. Níveis de degradação foram altos, oscilando de forma quadrática (níveis 2, 4, 5 e IDP) e potencial (nível 1) com a precipitação (p < 0,01), o que sugere que a irrigação possa ser prática eficiente no controle da degradação. Durante o ano, pelo menos 51,27% das pastagens apresentaram algum sinal de degradação, atingindo-se a marca de 91,32%, no período seco. Os resultados sugerem pior qualidade e maiores níveis de degradação de pastagens em terras elevadas e declivosas. Devido às condições socioambientais locais, indica-se o uso de sistemas silvipastoris agroecológicos no manejo das pastagens.Palavras-chave: uso da terra, sensoriamento remoto, relação solo paisagem, Zona da Mata, índice de qualidade. MANAGEMENT, QUALITY AND DEGRADATION DYNAMICS OF PASTURES IN ATLANTIC FOREST BIOME, MINAS GERAIS – BRASIL ABSTRACT:Pastures under inefficient management practices get degraded, leading to serious socioeconomic and environmental issues. That being said, understanding the dynamics of such systems and their interaction with the environment is essential when it comes to looking towards sustainable alternatives for livestock activities. The management, annual dynamics and socio-environmental interactions in pastures in an hydrographic basin located in Atlantic Forest biome, Minas Gerais, Brasil, were studied during the hydrological year of 2016/2017. Field data and farmers reports were utilized, such as remote sensing via images from LANDSAT 8 OLI and Google Earth Pro®. A quality index was proposed for the pastures, which usually presented medium quality. Degradation levels were high, oscillating in a quadratic basis (levels 2, 4, 5 and IDP) and potential (level 1) with precipitation (p < 0,01), which suggests that irrigation might be an efficient practice when it comes to degradation control. During the year, at least 51,27% of pastures have presented signs of degradation, achieving 91,32% in dry periods. The results suggest less quality and bigger degradation levels in pastures located in high and steep areas. Considering the local environmental conditions, agroecological silvopasture systems are recommended regarding the pastures management.Keywords: land use, remote sensing, soil/landscape relationships, Zona da Mata, quality index.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2020 (1) ◽  
pp. 798-805
Author(s):  
Ratu Kintan Karina ◽  
Robert Kurniawan

Penelitian ini dilakukan di Kabupaten Lahat yang mana potensi banjir pada daerah ini juga disebabkan oleh daya guna lahan yang berkurang. Sehingga penelitian ini dilakukan untuk melihat bagaimana peta penggunaan lahan di Kabupaten Lahat dalam satu tahun terakhir dan bagaimana persentase dari setiap lahan tersebut dengan melakukan penginderaan jauh yang memanfaatkan citra satelit Landsat 8. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah metode deskriptif dan metode analisis citra yang mana semua pengolahan dan analisis dilakukan pada Google Earth Engine. Berdasarkan hasil penelitian, peta penggunaan lahan ini memperoleh akurasi keseluruhan sebesar 89,38% dan akurasi Kappa sebesar 85,21%, dimana sebaran luas penggunaan lahan di Kecamatan Lahat untuk Kawasan Vegetasi seluas 2941,81 km2 atau 82,32%, Badan Air seluas 58,73 km2 atau 1,64%, Lahan Terbangun seluas 177,52 km2 atau 4,97%, Tambak seluas 57,29 km2 atau 1,60%, Rumput/Semak seluas 1,09 km2 atau 0,03%, Lahan Terbuka seluas 39,97 km2 atau 1,12%, dan Sawah seluas 297,30 km2 atau 8,32%. Sehingga dapat disimpulkan bahwa peta penggunaan lahan yang dihasilkan menunjukkan kawasan vegetasi merupakan lahan terluas di Kabupaten Lahat dan lahan rumput/semak belukar merupakan lahan yang paling dikit di Kabupaten Lahat. Namun hasil yang diperoleh tidak menutup kemungkinan adanya kesalahan dalam interpretasi citra sehingga masih perlu dilakukan observasi lapangan untuk mengecek kesesuaian dan memperkuat hasil akurasi penggunaan lahan.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wasir Samad Daming ◽  
Muhammad Anshar Amran ◽  
Amir Hamzah Muhiddin ◽  
Rahmadi Tambaru

Surface chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) distribution have been analyzed with seasonal variation during southeast monsoon in southern part of Makassar Strait and Flores Sea. Satellite data of Landsat-8 is applied to this study to formulate the distribution of chlorophyll concentration during monsoonal wind period. The distribution of chlorophyll concentration was normally peaked condition in August during southeast monsoon. Satellite data showed that a slowdown in the rise of the distribution of chlorophyll in September with a lower concentration than normal is likely due to a weakening the strength of southeast trade winds during June – July – August 2016. Further analysis shows that the southern part of the Makassar strait is likely occurrence of upwelling characterized by increase in surface chlorophyll concentrations were identified as the potential area of fishing ground.


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