scholarly journals Application of the Random Forest Classifier to Map Irrigated Areas Using Google Earth Engine

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 876
Author(s):  
James Magidi ◽  
Luxon Nhamo ◽  
Sylvester Mpandeli ◽  
Tafadzwanashe Mabhaudhi
Keyword(s):  
Random Forest ◽  
Land Use Planning ◽  
Classification Accuracy ◽  
Vegetation Index ◽  
Learning Algorithm ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Management Platform ◽  
Normalised Difference Vegetation Index ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
The Impact

Improvements in irrigated areas’ classification accuracy are critical to enhance agricultural water management and inform policy and decision-making on irrigation expansion and land use planning. This is particularly relevant in water-scarce regions where there are plans to increase the land under irrigation to enhance food security, yet the actual spatial extent of current irrigation areas is unknown. This study applied a non-parametric machine learning algorithm, the random forest, to process and classify irrigated areas using images acquired by the Landsat and Sentinel satellites, for Mpumalanga Province in Africa. The classification process was automated on a big-data management platform, the Google Earth Engine (GEE), and the R-programming was used for post-processing. The normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) was subsequently used to distinguish between irrigated and rainfed areas during 2018/19 and 2019/20 winter growing seasons. High NDVI values on cultivated land during the dry season are an indication of irrigation. The classification of cultivated areas was for 2020, but 2019 irrigated areas were also classified to assess the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on agriculture. The comparison in irrigated areas between 2019 and 2020 facilitated an assessment of changes in irrigated areas in smallholder farming areas. The approach enhanced the classification accuracy of irrigated areas using ground-based training samples and very high-resolution images (VHRI) and fusion with existing datasets and the use of expert and local knowledge of the study area. The overall classification accuracy was 88%.

scholarly journals Automated detection of individual juniper tree location and forest cover changes using Google Earth Engine

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-72
Author(s):  
Sudeera Wickramarathna ◽  
Jamon Van Den Hoek ◽  
Bogdan Strimbu
Keyword(s):  
Random Forest ◽  
Vegetation Index ◽  
Forest Cover ◽  
Near Infrared ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Random Forest Algorithm ◽  
Individual Tree ◽  
Western Juniper ◽  
Effective Manner ◽  
Google Earth Engine

Tree detection is the first step in the appraisal of a forest, especially when the focus is monitoring the growth of tree canopy. The acquisition of annual very high-resolution aerial images by the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) and their accessibility through Google Earth Engine (GEE) supports the delineation of tree canopies and change over time in a cost and time-effective manner. The objectives of this study are to develop an automated method to detect the crowns of individual western Juniper (Juniperus occidentalis) trees and to assess the change of forest cover from multispectral 1-meter resolution NAIP images collected from 2009 to 2016 in Oregon, USA. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), and Ratio Vegetation Index (RVI) were calculated from the NAIP images, in addition to the red-green-blue-near infrared bands. To identify the most suitable approach for individual tree crown identification, we created two training datasets: one considering yearly images separately and one merging all images, irrespective of the year. We segmented individual tree crowns using a random forest algorithm implemented in GEE and seven rasters, namely the reflectance of four spectral bands as recorded by the NAIP images (i.e., the red-green-blue-near infrared) and three calculated indices (i.e., NDVI, NDWI, and RVI). We compared the estimated location of the trees, computed as the centroid of the crown, with the visually identified treetops, which were considered as validation locations. We found that tree location errors were smaller when years were analyzed individually than by merging the years. Measurements of completeness (74%), correctness (94%), and mean accuracy detection (82 %) show promising performance of the random forest algorithm in crown delineation, considering that only four original input bands were used for crown segmentation. The change in the calculated crown area for western juniper follows a sinusoidal curve, with a decrease from 2011 to 2012 and an increase from 2012 to 2014. The proposed approach has the potential to estimate individual tree locations and forest cover area dynamics at broad spatial scales using regularly collected airborne imagery with easy-to-implement methods.

scholarly journals A Long-Term Spatiotemporal Analysis of Vegetation Greenness over the Himalayan Region Using Google Earth Engine

Climate ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Nikul Kumari ◽  
Ankur Srivastava ◽  
Umesh Chandra Dumka
Keyword(s):  
Vegetation Index ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Himalayan Region ◽  
Spatiotemporal Variability ◽  
Series Data ◽  
Vegetation Greenness ◽  
Normalised Difference Vegetation Index ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Hydroclimatic Factors ◽  
The Relationship

The Himalayas constitute one of the richest and most diverse ecosystems in the Indian sub-continent. Vegetation greenness driven by climate in the Himalayan region is often overlooked as field-based studies are challenging due to high altitude and complex topography. Although the basic information about vegetation cover and its interactions with different hydroclimatic factors is vital, limited attention has been given to understanding the response of vegetation to different climatic factors. The main aim of the present study is to analyse the relationship between the spatiotemporal variability of vegetation greenness and associated climatic and hydrological drivers within the Upper Khoh River (UKR) Basin of the Himalayas at annual and seasonal scales. We analysed two vegetation indices, namely, normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) and enhanced vegetation index (EVI) time-series data, for the last 20 years (2001–2020) using Google Earth Engine. We found that both the NDVI and EVI showed increasing trends in the vegetation greening during the period under consideration, with the NDVI being consistently higher than the EVI. The mean NDVI and EVI increased from 0.54 and 0.31 (2001), respectively, to 0.65 and 0.36 (2020). Further, the EVI tends to correlate better with the different hydroclimatic factors in comparison to the NDVI. The EVI is strongly correlated with ET with r2 = 0.73 whereas the NDVI showed satisfactory performance with r2 = 0.45. On the other hand, the relationship between the EVI and precipitation yielded r2 = 0.34, whereas there was no relationship was observed between the NDVI and precipitation. These findings show that there exists a strong correlation between the EVI and hydroclimatic factors, which shows that changes in vegetation phenology can be better captured using the EVI than the NDVI.

scholarly journals Annual Normalized Difference Vegetation Index time-series data for Australian statistical areas

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Ramsey ◽  
Suzanne Mavoa
Keyword(s):  
Vegetation Index ◽  
Time Series Data ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Series Data ◽  
Atmospheric Effects ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Normalised Difference Vegetation Index ◽  
Moderate Resolution ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Statistical Area

Google Earth Engine provides researchers with a platform for conducting planetary scale analysis of environmental processes and landcover change, both by providing the necessary tools and by handling the large quantities of data these analyses require. The most widely used moderate-resolution sensors, onboard the Landsat satellite platforms, often require pre-processing to prepare the data for analysis. This data set consists of Australia-wide Landsat derived Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) values for the years 2001-2019. The median annual NDVI value for each Statistical Area 1 (SA1) and Statistical Area 2 (SA2) were calculated, and statistics for this imagery is provided in a tabular format. The accompanying Google Earth Engine script applies the pre-processing steps required to account for sensor, solar and atmospheric effects, improving continuity between imagery across space and time and therefore, will enable researchers beyond the remote sensing community to access analysis-ready imagery for the moderate resolution Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellite platforms.

scholarly journals Assessment of Annual Composite Images Obtained by Google Earth Engine for Urban Areas Mapping Using Random Forest

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 748
Author(s):  
Zhaoming Zhang ◽  
Mingyue Wei ◽  
Dongchuan Pu ◽  
Guojin He ◽  
Guizhou Wang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Random Forest ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Landsat 8 ◽  
Annual Time Series ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Time Series Images ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Annual Time

Urban areas represent the primary source region of greenhouse gas emissions. Mapping urban areas is essential for understanding land cover change, carbon cycles, and climate change (urban areas also refer to impervious surfaces, i.e., artificial cover and structures). Remote sensing has greatly advanced urban areas mapping over the last several decades. At present, we have entered the era of big data. Long time series of satellite data such as Landsat and high-performance computing platforms such as Google Earth Engine (GEE) offer new opportunities to map urban areas. The objective of this research was to determine how annual time series images from Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) can effectively be composed to map urban areas in three cities in China in support of GEE. Three reducer functions, ee.Reducer.min(), ee.Reducer.median(), and ee.Reducer.max() provided by GEE, were selected to construct four schemes to synthesize the annual intensive time series Landsat 8 OLI data for three cities in China. Then, urban areas were mapped based on the random forest algorithm and the accuracy was evaluated in detail. The results show that (1) the quality of annual composite images was improved significantly, particularly in reducing the impact of cloud and cloud shadows, and (2) the annual composite images obtained by the combination of multiple reducer functions had better performance than that obtained by a single reducer function. Further, the overall accuracy of urban areas mapping with the combination of multiple reducer functions exceeded 90% in all three cities in China. In summary, a suitable combination of reducer functions for synthesizing annual time series images can enhance data quality and ensure differences between characteristics and higher precision for urban areas mapping.

scholarly journals Exploratory Analysis of Driving Force of Wildfires in Australia: An Application of Machine Learning within Google Earth Engine

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Andrea Sulova ◽  
Jamal Jokar Arsanjani
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Machine Learning ◽  
Random Forest ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Summer Season ◽  
Driving Factors ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Classification And Regression Tree ◽  
Training Dataset ◽  
Google Earth Engine

Recent studies have suggested that due to climate change, the number of wildfires across the globe have been increasing and continue to grow even more. The recent massive wildfires, which hit Australia during the 2019–2020 summer season, raised questions to what extent the risk of wildfires can be linked to various climate, environmental, topographical, and social factors and how to predict fire occurrences to take preventive measures. Hence, the main objective of this study was to develop an automatized and cloud-based workflow for generating a training dataset of fire events at a continental level using freely available remote sensing data with a reasonable computational expense for injecting into machine learning models. As a result, a data-driven model was set up in Google Earth Engine platform, which is publicly accessible and open for further adjustments. The training dataset was applied to different machine learning algorithms, i.e., Random Forest, Naïve Bayes, and Classification and Regression Tree. The findings show that Random Forest outperformed other algorithms and hence it was used further to explore the driving factors using variable importance analysis. The study indicates the probability of fire occurrences across Australia as well as identifies the potential driving factors of Australian wildfires for the 2019–2020 summer season. The methodical approach and achieved results and drawn conclusions can be of great importance to policymakers, environmentalists, and climate change researchers, among others.

scholarly journals Google Earth Engine as Multi-Sensor Open-Source Tool for Supporting the Preservation of Archaeological Areas: The Case Study of Flood and Fire Mapping in Metaponto, Italy

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 1791
Author(s):  
Carmen Fattore ◽  
Nicodemo Abate ◽  
Farid Faridani ◽  
Nicola Masini ◽  
Rosa Lasaponara
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Archaeological Site ◽  
Unsupervised Classification ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Heritage Sites ◽  
Cultural Properties ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Archaeological Areas ◽  
The Impact

In recent years, the impact of Climate change, anthropogenic and natural hazards (such as earthquakes, landslides, floods, tsunamis, fires) has dramatically increased and adversely affected modern and past human buildings including outstanding cultural properties and UNESCO heritage sites. Research about protection/monitoring of cultural heritage is crucial to preserve our cultural properties and (with them also) our history and identity. This paper is focused on the use of the open-source Google Earth Engine tool herein used to analyze flood and fire events which affected the area of Metaponto (southern Italy), near the homonymous Greek-Roman archaeological site. The use of the Google Earth Engine has allowed the supervised and unsupervised classification of areas affected by flooding (2013–2020) and fire (2017) in the past years, obtaining remarkable results and useful information for setting up strategies to mitigate damage and support the preservation of areas and landscape rich in cultural and natural heritage.

scholarly journals Real-Time AI-Based Informational Decision-Making Support System Utilizing Dynamic Text Sources

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (13) ◽  
pp. 6237
Author(s):  
Azharul Islam ◽  
KyungHi Chang
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Random Forest ◽  
Support System ◽  
Classification Accuracy ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Learning Algorithm ◽  
Unstructured Data ◽  
Stochastic Gradient Descent ◽  
Decision Making Support

Unstructured data from the internet constitute large sources of information, which need to be formatted in a user-friendly way. This research develops a model that classifies unstructured data from data mining into labeled data, and builds an informational and decision-making support system (DMSS). We often have assortments of information collected by mining data from various sources, where the key challenge is to extract valuable information. We observe substantial classification accuracy enhancement for our datasets with both machine learning and deep learning algorithms. The highest classification accuracy (99% in training, 96% in testing) was achieved from a Covid corpus which is processed by using a long short-term memory (LSTM). Furthermore, we conducted tests on large datasets relevant to the Disaster corpus, with an LSTM classification accuracy of 98%. In addition, random forest (RF), a machine learning algorithm, provides a reasonable 84% accuracy. This research’s main objective is to increase the application’s robustness by integrating intelligence into the developed DMSS, which provides insight into the user’s intent, despite dealing with a noisy dataset. Our designed model selects the random forest and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms’ F1 score, where the RF method outperforms by improving accuracy by 2% (to 83% from 81%) compared with a conventional method.

ANALISIS TEMPORAL PERUBAHAN HUTAN MANGROVE MENGGUNAKAN CITRA SATELIT SENTINEL-2 (Studi Kasus di Pulau Tanakeke, Kabupaten Takalar)

2021 ◽  
pp. 777
Author(s):  
Andi Tenri Waru ◽  
Athar Abdurrahman Bayanuddin ◽  
Ferman Setia Nugroho ◽  
Nita Rukminasari
Keyword(s):  
Random Forest ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Multi Temporal ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Sentinel 2

Pulau Tanakeke merupakan salah satu pulau dengan hutan mangrove yang luas di pesisir Sulawesi Selatan. Hutan mangrove ini menjadi ekosistem penting bagi masyarakat sekitar karena nilai ekologi maupun ekonominya. Namun, dalam kurun waktu sekitar tahun 1980-2000, keberadaan mangrove tersebut terancam oleh perubahan penggunaan lahan dan juga pemanfaatan yang berlebihan. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis perubahan temporal luas dan tingkat kerapatan hutan mangrove di Pulau Tanakeke antara tahun 2016 dan 2019. Metode analisis perubahan luasan hutan mangrove menggunakan data citra satelit Sentinel-2 multi temporal berdasarkan hasil klasifikasi hutan mangrove dengan menggunakan random forest pada platform Google Earth Engine. Akurasi keseluruhan hasil klasifikasi hutan mangrove tahun 2016 dan 2019 sebesar 91% dan 98%. Berdasarkan hasil analisis spasial diperoleh perubahan penurunan luasan mangrove yang signifikan dari 800,21 ha menjadi 640,15 ha. Kerapatan mangrove di Pulau Tanakeke sebagian besar tergolong kategori dalam kerapatan tinggi.

PENERAPAN MACHINE LEARNING BERBASIS DATA GEOSPASIAL UNTUK OPTIMALISASI LAHAN PERTANIAN PADA MASA PANDEMI DAN PASCA PANDEMI

2021 ◽  
pp. 161
Author(s):  
Royyannuur Kurniawan Endrayanto ◽  
Adharul Muttaqin
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Random Forest ◽  
Early Warning Systems ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Warning Systems ◽  
Land Data Assimilation ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Land Data Assimilation System ◽  
Data Assimilation System ◽  
Assimilation System

Pertanian merupakan salah satu sektor penting karena dapat memenuhi kebutuhan pangan sebagai kebutuhan pokok. Kebutuhan pangan masih menjadi salah satu isu hangat terlebih di masa pandemi COVID- 19 seperti saat ini. Pemenuhan kebutuhan pangan juga berkaitan erat dengan jumlah bahan pangan yang diproduksi oleh petani. Lingkungan merupakan salah satu faktor keberhasilan dalam kegiatan pertanian. Kondisi lingkungan Indonesia yang beragam seperti suhu dan tingkat presipitasi menyebabkan adanya perbedaan jenis tanaman pangan potensial setiap daerah di Indonesia. Oleh karena itu perlu upaya untuk mengoptimalkan produksi lahan pertanian berdasarkan faktor lingkungan di setiap daerah. Upaya ini diharapkan dapat membantu menjaga ketahanan pangan baik di masa pandemi dan pasca pandemi. Pada penelitian ini diperkenalkan pemanfaatan data geospasial untuk klasifikasi jenis tanaman pangan menggunakan algoritma machine learning sebagai upaya optimalisasi lahan pertanian. Data yang digunakan adalah Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) Land Data Assimilation System (FLDAS). Algoritma machine learning yang digunakan adalah algoritma klasifikasi Random Forest. Teknologi yang digunakan adalah Google Colab, Google Earth Engine dan Python. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengklasifikasikan tanaman pangan yang memiliki potensi paling baik untuk ditanam di suatu daerah berdasarkan kondisi lingkungan yang ada.

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