scholarly journals MULTI-TEMPORAL ANALYSIS OF DENSE AND SPARSE FORESTS’ RADAR BACKSCATTER USING SENTINEL-1A COLLECTION IN GOOGLE EARTH ENGINE

Author(s):  
C. M. Arellano ◽  
A. A. Maralit ◽  
E. C. Paringit ◽  
C. J. Sarmiento ◽  
R. A. Faelga ◽  
...  

Abstract. Radar data has been historically expensive and complex to process. However, in this milieu of cloud-computing platforms and open-source datasets, radar data analysis has become convenient and can now be performed for more exploratory researches. This study aims to perform multi-temporal analysis of radar backscatter to characterize dense and sparse forest from Sentinel-1 images. The area of study are reforested sites under the National Greening Program (NGP) of the Philippines. Ground data were collected: (1) in 2019, from a 1.35 ha -site in Brgy. Calula, Ipil, Zamboanga Sibugay, (2) in 2019, from a 1.10 ha- site in Brgy. Cabatuanan, Basay, Negros Oriental, and (3) from PhilLiDAR 2 – Project 3: FRExLS’ 2.4 ha -validated site in Ubay, Bohol. SAR intensity values were derived from Sentinel-1 from Google Earth Engine, which is a cloud-based platform with a repository of satellite images and functionalities for data extraction and processing. The temporal variation in C-band radar backscatter from 2014 to 2018 were analyzed. The results show, for the whole period of analysis, that: in VH polarization, dense forest samples backscatter range from −11 to −18 dB in VH and −2 to -13 dB in VV; sparse forest samples range from −12 to -21 dB in VH and −7 to −14 dB in VV; ground samples range from −12 to −24 dB in VH and −6 to −15 dB in VV; and water samples range from −21 to −30 dB in VH and −11 to −26 dB in VV. Forest backscatter are expected to saturate over time, especially in dense forests. These variations are due to differences in forest species, landscape, environmental and climatic drivers, and phenomenon or interventions on the site.

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avi Putri Pertiwi ◽  
Chengfa Benjamin Lee ◽  
Dimosthenis Traganos

The lack of clarity in turbid coastal waters interferes with light attenuation and hinders remotely sensed studies in aquatic ecology such as benthic habitat mapping and bathymetry estimation. Although turbid water column corrections can be applied on regions with seasonal turbidity by performing multi-temporal analysis, different approaches are needed in regions where the water is constantly turbid or only exhibits subtle turbidity variations through time. This study aims to detect these turbid zones (TZs) in optically shallow coastal waters using multi-temporal Sentinel-2 surface reflectance datasets to improve the aforementioned studies. The herein framework can be paired with other aquatic ecology remote sensing studies to establish the clear water focus area and can also be used by decision makers to identify rehabilitation areas. We selected the coastlines of Guinea-Bissau, Tunisia, and west Madagascar as our case studies which feature wide-ranging turbidity intensities across tropical, subtropical, and Mediterranean waters and applied three different methods for the TZ detection: Otsu’s method for bimodal thresholding, linear spectral unmixing, and Random Forest (RF) machine learning method on Google Earth Engine as an end-to-end process. Based on our experiments, the RF method yields good results in all study regions with overall accuracies ranging between 88 and 96% and F1-scores between 0.87 and 0.96. TZ detection is highly site-specific due to the inter-class variability that is mainly affected by the nature of the suspended materials and the environmental characteristics of the site.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 1433
Author(s):  
Shobitha Shetty ◽  
Prasun Kumar Gupta ◽  
Mariana Belgiu ◽  
S. K. Srivastav

Machine learning classifiers are being increasingly used nowadays for Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) mapping from remote sensing images. However, arriving at the right choice of classifier requires understanding the main factors influencing their performance. The present study investigated firstly the effect of training sampling design on the classification results obtained by Random Forest (RF) classifier and, secondly, it compared its performance with other machine learning classifiers for LULC mapping using multi-temporal satellite remote sensing data and the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. We evaluated the impact of three sampling methods, namely Stratified Equal Random Sampling (SRS(Eq)), Stratified Proportional Random Sampling (SRS(Prop)), and Stratified Systematic Sampling (SSS) upon the classification results obtained by the RF trained LULC model. Our results showed that the SRS(Prop) method favors major classes while achieving good overall accuracy. The SRS(Eq) method provides good class-level accuracies, even for minority classes, whereas the SSS method performs well for areas with large intra-class variability. Toward evaluating the performance of machine learning classifiers, RF outperformed Classification and Regression Trees (CART), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Relevance Vector Machine (RVM) with a >95% confidence level. The performance of CART and SVM classifiers were found to be similar. RVM achieved good classification results with a limited number of training samples.


2021 ◽  
pp. 777
Author(s):  
Andi Tenri Waru ◽  
Athar Abdurrahman Bayanuddin ◽  
Ferman Setia Nugroho ◽  
Nita Rukminasari

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.


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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 228 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiusheng Wu ◽  
Charles R. Lane ◽  
Xuecao Li ◽  
Kaiguang Zhao ◽  
Yuyu Zhou ◽  
...  

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