scholarly journals A national extent map of cropland and grassland for Switzerland based on Sentinel-2 data

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Pazúr ◽  
Nica Huber ◽  
Dominique Weber ◽  
Christian Ginzler ◽  
Bronwyn Price
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Land Use Planning ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Agricultural Landscapes ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Growing Seasons ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Sentinel 2

Abstract. Agricultural landscapes support multiple functions and are of great importance for biodiversity. Heterogeneous agricultural mosaics of cropland and grassland commonly result from variable land use practices and ecosystem service demands. Switzerland’s agricultural land use is considerably spatially heterogeneous due to strong variability in conditions, especially topography and climate, thus presenting challenges to automated agricultural mapping. Nation-wide knowledge of the location of cropland and grassland is necessary for effective conservation and land use planning. We mapped the distribution of cropland and grassland across Switzerland. We used several indices largely derived from Sentinel-2 satellite imagery captured over multiple growing seasons, and parcel-based training data derived from landholder reporting. The mapping was conducted within Google Earth Engine using a random forest classifier. The resulting map has high accuracy in lowlands as well as in mountainous areas. The map will act as a base agricultural land cover dataset for researchers and  practitioners working in agricultural areas of Switzerland and interested in land cover and landscape structure. The map as well as the training data and calculation algorithms (using Google Earth Engine) are freely available for download on the Envidat platform (doi: 10.16904/envidat.205). 

The Potential of Sentinel-2 Satellite Images for Land-Cover/Land-Use and Forest Biomass Estimation: A Review

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crismeire Isbaex ◽  
Ana Margarida Coelho
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Satellite Images ◽  
Forest Biomass ◽  
Local Scale ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Biomass Estimation ◽  
Promising Tool ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Sentinel 2

Mapping land-cover/land-use (LCLU) and estimating forest biomass using satellite images is a challenge given the diversity of sensors available and the heterogeneity of forests. Copernicus program served by the Sentinel satellites family and the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform, both with free and open services accessible to its users, present a good approach for mapping vegetation and estimate forest biomass on a global, regional, or local scale, periodically and in a repeated way. The Sentinel-2 (S2) systematically acquires optical imagery and provides global monitoring data with high spatial resolution (10–60 m) images. Given the novelty of information on the use of S2 data, this chapter presents a review on LCLU maps and forest above-ground biomass (AGB) estimates, in addition to exploring the efficiency of using the GEE platform. The Sentinel data have great potential for studies on LCLU classification and forest biomass estimates. The GEE platform is a promising tool for executing complex workflows of satellite data processing.

scholarly journals Characterizing the Up-To-Date Land-Use and Land-Cover Change in Xiong’an New Area from 2017 to 2020 Using the Multi-Temporal Sentinel-2 Images on Google Earth Engine

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 464
Author(s):  
Jiansong Luo ◽  
Xinwen Ma ◽  
Qifeng Chu ◽  
Min Xie ◽  
Yujia Cao
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
State Level ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Lulc Changes ◽  
Classification Framework ◽  
Multi Temporal ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Sentinel 2

Land use and land cover (LULC) are fundamental units of human activities. Therefore, it is of significance to accurately and in a timely manner obtain the LULC maps where dramatic LULC changes are undergoing. Since 2017 April, a new state-level area, Xiong’an New Area, was established in China. In order to better characterize the LULC changes in Xiong’an New Area, this study makes full use of the multi-temporal 10-m Sentinel-2 images, the cloud-computing Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform, and the powerful classification capability of random forest (RF) models to generate the continuous LULC maps from 2017 to 2020. To do so, a novel multiple RF-based classification framework is adopted by outputting the classification probability based on each monthly composite and aggregating the multiple probability maps to generate the final classification map. Based on the obtained LULC maps, this study analyzes the spatio-temporal changes of LULC types in the last four years and the different change patterns in three counties. Experimental results indicate that the derived LULC maps achieve high accuracy for each year, with the overall accuracy and Kappa values no less than 0.95. It is also found that the changed areas account for nearly 36%, and the dry farmland, impervious surface, and other land-cover types have changed dramatically and present varying change patterns in three counties, which might be caused by the latest planning of Xiong’an New Area. The obtained 10-m four-year LULC maps in this study are supposed to provide some valuable information on the monitoring and understanding of what kinds of LULC changes have taken place in Xiong’an New Area.

scholarly journals Analysis of Land Use and Land Cover Using Machine Learning Algorithms on Google Earth Engine for Munneru River Basin, India

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 13758
Author(s):  
Kotapati Narayana Loukika ◽  
Venkata Reddy Keesara ◽  
Venkataramana Sridhar
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Learning Algorithms ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Landsat 8 ◽  
Lulc Change ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Sentinel 2

The growing human population accelerates alterations in land use and land cover (LULC) over time, putting tremendous strain on natural resources. Monitoring and assessing LULC change over large areas is critical in a variety of fields, including natural resource management and climate change research. LULC change has emerged as a critical concern for policymakers and environmentalists. As the need for the reliable estimation of LULC maps from remote sensing data grows, it is critical to comprehend how different machine learning classifiers perform. The primary goal of the present study was to classify LULC on the Google Earth Engine platform using three different machine learning algorithms—namely, support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and classification and regression trees (CART)—and to compare their performance using accuracy assessments. The LULC of the study area was classified via supervised classification. For improved classification accuracy, NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index) and NDWI (normalized difference water index) indices were also derived and included. For the years 2016, 2018, and 2020, multitemporal Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 data with spatial resolutions of 10 m and 30 m were used for the LULC classification. ‘Water bodies’, ‘forest’, ‘barren land’, ‘vegetation’, and ‘built-up’ were the major land use classes. The average overall accuracy of SVM, RF, and CART classifiers for Landsat-8 images was 90.88%, 94.85%, and 82.88%, respectively, and 93.8%, 95.8%, and 86.4% for Sentinel-2 images. These results indicate that RF classifiers outperform both SVM and CART classifiers in terms of accuracy.

scholarly journals Continental-Scale Land Cover Mapping at 10 m Resolution Over Europe (ELC10)

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 2301
Author(s):  
Zander Venter ◽  
Markus Sydenham
Keyword(s):  
Land Cover ◽  
Atmospheric Correction ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Tree Planting ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Classification Model ◽  
Night Time ◽  
Continental Scale ◽  
Land Cover Maps ◽  
Sentinel 2

Land cover maps are important tools for quantifying the human footprint on the environment and facilitate reporting and accounting to international agreements addressing the Sustainable Development Goals. Widely used European land cover maps such as CORINE (Coordination of Information on the Environment) are produced at medium spatial resolutions (100 m) and rely on diverse data with complex workflows requiring significant institutional capacity. We present a 10 m resolution land cover map (ELC10) of Europe based on a satellite-driven machine learning workflow that is annually updatable. A random forest classification model was trained on 70K ground-truth points from the LUCAS (Land Use/Cover Area Frame Survey) dataset. Within the Google Earth Engine cloud computing environment, the ELC10 map can be generated from approx. 700 TB of Sentinel imagery within approx. 4 days from a single research user account. The map achieved an overall accuracy of 90% across eight land cover classes and could account for statistical unit land cover proportions within 3.9% (R2 = 0.83) of the actual value. These accuracies are higher than that of CORINE (100 m) and other 10 m land cover maps including S2GLC and FROM-GLC10. Spectro-temporal metrics that capture the phenology of land cover classes were most important in producing high mapping accuracies. We found that the atmospheric correction of Sentinel-2 and the speckle filtering of Sentinel-1 imagery had a minimal effect on enhancing the classification accuracy (< 1%). However, combining optical and radar imagery increased accuracy by 3% compared to Sentinel-2 alone and by 10% compared to Sentinel-1 alone. The addition of auxiliary data (terrain, climate and night-time lights) increased accuracy by an additional 2%. By using the centroid pixels from the LUCAS Copernicus module polygons we increased accuracy by <1%, revealing that random forests are robust against contaminated training data. Furthermore, the model requires very little training data to achieve moderate accuracies—the difference between 5K and 50K LUCAS points is only 3% (86 vs. 89%). This implies that significantly less resources are necessary for making in situ survey data (such as LUCAS) suitable for satellite-based land cover classification. At 10 m resolution, the ELC10 map can distinguish detailed landscape features like hedgerows and gardens, and therefore holds potential for aerial statistics at the city borough level and monitoring property-level environmental interventions (e.g., tree planting). Due to the reliance on purely satellite-based input data, the ELC10 map can be continuously updated independent of any country-specific geographic datasets.

scholarly journals Qualifying Land Use and Land Cover Dynamics and Their Impacts on Ecosystem Service in Central Himalaya Transboundary Landscape Based on Google Earth Engine

Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 173
Author(s):  
Changjun Gu ◽  
Yili Zhang ◽  
Linshan Liu ◽  
Lanhui Li ◽  
Shicheng Li ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Ecosystem Service ◽  
Forest Cover ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Forest Cover Change ◽  
Sacred Landscape ◽  
Lulc Changes ◽  
Google Earth Engine

Land use and land cover (LULC) changes are regarded as one of the key drivers of ecosystem services degradation, especially in mountain regions where they may provide various ecosystem services to local livelihoods and surrounding areas. Additionally, ecosystems and habitats extend across political boundaries, causing more difficulties for ecosystem conservation. LULC in the Kailash Sacred Landscape (KSL) has undergone obvious changes over the past four decades; however, the spatiotemporal changes of the LULC across the whole of the KSL are still unclear, as well as the effects of LULC changes on ecosystem service values (ESVs). Thus, in this study we analyzed LULC changes across the whole of the KSL between 2000 and 2015 using Google Earth Engine (GEE) and quantified their impacts on ESVs. The greatest loss in LULC was found in forest cover, which decreased from 5443.20 km2 in 2000 to 5003.37 km2 in 2015 and which mainly occurred in KSL-Nepal. Meanwhile, the largest growth was observed in grassland (increased by 548.46 km2), followed by cropland (increased by 346.90 km2), both of which mainly occurred in KSL-Nepal. Further analysis showed that the expansions of cropland were the major drivers of the forest cover change in the KSL. Furthermore, the conversion of cropland to shrub land indicated that farmland abandonment existed in the KSL during the study period. The observed forest degradation directly influenced the ESV changes in the KSL. The total ESVs in the KSL decreased from 36.53 × 108 USD y−1 in 2000 to 35.35 × 108 USD y−1 in 2015. Meanwhile, the ESVs of the forestry areas decreased by 1.34 × 108 USD y−1. This shows that the decrease of ESVs in forestry was the primary cause to the loss of total ESVs and also of the high elasticity. Our findings show that even small changes to the LULC, especially in forestry areas, are noteworthy as they could induce a strong ESV response.

Mapping land use on Irish raised bogs using Sentinel-2 imagery and Google Earth Engine

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wahaj Habib ◽  
John Connolly ◽  
Kevin McGuiness
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Land Use Change ◽  
Optical Sensors ◽  
Ghg Emissions ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Good Prospect ◽  
Raised Bogs ◽  
Google Earth Engine ◽  
Sentinel 2

&lt;p&gt;Peatlands are one of the most space-efficient terrestrial carbon stores. They cover approximately 3 % of the terrestrial land surface and account for about one-third of the total soil organic carbon stock. Peatlands have been under severe strain for centuries all over the world due to management related activities. In Ireland, peatlands span over approximately 14600 km&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, and 85 % of that has already been degraded to some extent. To achieve temperature goals agreed in the Paris agreement and fulfil the EU&amp;#8217;s commitment to quantifying the Carbon/Green House Gases (C/GHG) emissions from land use, land use change forestry, accurate mapping and identification of management related activities (land use) on peatlands is important.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;High-resolution multispectral satellite imagery by European Space Agency (ESA) i.e., Sentinel-2 provides a good prospect for mapping peatland land use in Ireland. However, due to persistent cloud cover over Ireland, and the inability of optical sensors to penetrate the clouds makes the acquisition of clear sky imagery a challenge and hence hampers the analysis of the landscape. Google Earth Engine (a cloud-based planetary-scale satellite image platform) was used to create a cloud-free image mosaic from sentinel-2 data was created for raised bogs in Ireland (images collected for the time period between 2017-2020). A preliminary analysis was conducted to identify peatland land use classes, i.e., grassland/pasture, crop/tillage, built-up, cutover, cutaway and coniferous, broadleaf forests using this mosaicked image. The land-use classification results may be used as a baseline dataset since currently, no high-resolution peatland land use dataset exists for Ireland. It can also be used for quantification of land-use change on peatlands. Moreover, since Ireland will now be voluntarily accounting the GHG emissions from managed wetlands (including bogs), this data could also be useful for such type of assessment.&lt;/p&gt;

scholarly journals Mapping of Major Land-Use Changes in the Kolleru Lake Freshwater Ecosystem by Using Landsat Satellite Images in Google Earth Engine

Water ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 2493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meena Kumari Kolli ◽  
Christian Opp ◽  
Daniel Karthe ◽  
Michael Groll
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Land Use Changes ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Nutrient Concentrations ◽  
Freshwater Ecosystem ◽  
Lake Ecosystem ◽  
Lake Basin ◽  
Lake Area ◽  
Google Earth Engine

India’s largest freshwater ecosystem of the Kolleru Lake has experienced severe threats by land-use changes, including the construction of illegal fishponds around the lake area over the past five decades. Despite efforts to protect and restore the lake and its riparian zones, environmental pressures have increased over time. The present study provides a synthesis of human activities through major land-use changes around Kolleru Lake both before and after restoration measures. For this purpose, archives of all Landsat imageries from the last three decades were used to detect land cover changes. Using the Google Earth Engine cloud platform, three different land-use scenarios were classified for the year before restoration (1999), for 2008 immediately after the restoration, and for 2018, i.e., the current situation of the lake one decade afterward. Additionally, the NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) and NDWI (Normalized Difference Water Index) indices were used to identify land cover dynamics. The results show that the restoration was successful; consequently, after a decade, the lake was transformed into the previous state of restoration (i.e., 1999 situation). In 1999, 29.7% of the Kolleru Lake ecosystem was occupied by fishponds, and, after a decade of sustainable restoration, 27.7% of the area was fishponds, almost reaching the extent of the 1999 situation. On the one hand, aquaculture is one of the most promising sources of income, but there is also limited awareness of its negative environmental impacts among local residents. On the other hand, political commitment to protect the lake is weak, and integrated approaches considering all stakeholders are lacking. Nevertheless, alterations of land and water use, increasing nutrient concentrations, and sediment inputs from the lake basin have reached a level at which they threaten the biodiversity and functionality of India’s largest wetland ecosystem to the degree that immediate action is necessary to prevent irreversible degradation.

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