scholarly journals Use of Remotely Sensed Data to Enhance Estimation of Aboveground Biomass for the Dry Afromontane Forest in South-Central Ethiopia

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (20) ◽  
pp. 3335
Author(s):  
Habitamu Taddese ◽  
Zerihun Asrat ◽  
Ingunn Burud ◽  
Terje Gobakken ◽  
Hans Ole Ørka ◽  
...  

Periodic assessment of forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is essential to regulate the impacts of the changing climate. However, AGB estimation using field-based sample survey (FBSS) has limited precision due to cost and accessibility constraints. Fortunately, remote sensing technologies assist to improve AGB estimation precisions. Thus, this study assessed the role of remotely sensed (RS) data in improving the precision of AGB estimation in an Afromontane forest in south-central Ethiopia. The research objectives were to identify RS variables that are useful for estimating AGB and evaluate the extent of improvement in the precision of the remote sensing-assisted AGB estimates beyond the precision of a pure FBSS. Reference AGB data for model calibration and estimation were collected from 111 systematically distributed circular sample plots (SPs) of 1000 m2 area. Independent variables were derived from Landsat-8, Sentinel-2 and PlanetScope images acquired in January 2019. The area-weighted mean and standard deviation of the spectral reflectance, spectral index and texture (only for PlanetScope) variables were extracted for each SP. A maximum of two independent variables from each image type was fitted to a generalized linear model for AGB estimation using model-assisted estimators. The results of this study revealed that the Landsat-8 model with the predictor variable of shortwave infrared band reflectance and the PlanetScope model with the predictor variable of green band reflectance had estimation efficiency of 1.40 and 1.37, respectively. Similarly, the Sentinel-2 model, which had predictor variables of shortwave infrared reflectance and standard deviation of green leaf index, improved AGB estimation with the relative efficiency of 1.68. Utilizing freely available Sentinel-2 data seems to enhance the AGB estimation efficiency and reduce cost and extensive fieldwork in inaccessible areas.

Author(s):  
Yixin Jiang ◽  
Peng Kong ◽  
Hao Xu ◽  
Qiang Zhang ◽  
Xingwen Quan ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
A. H. Ngandam Mfondoum ◽  
P. G. Gbetkom ◽  
R. Cooper ◽  
S. Hakdaoui ◽  
M. B. Mansour Badamassi

Abstract. This paper addresses the remote sensing challenging field of urban mixed pixels on a medium spatial resolution satellite data. The tentatively named Normalized Difference Built-up and Surroundings Unmixing Index (NDBSUI) is proposed by using Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) bands. It uses the Shortwave Infrared 2 (SWIR2) as the main wavelength, the SWIR1 with the red wavelengths, for the built-up extraction. A ratio is computed based on the normalization process and the application is made on six cities with different urban and environmental characteristics. The built-up of the experimental site of Yaoundé is extracted with an overall accuracy of 95.51% and a kappa coefficient of 0.90. The NDBSUI is validated over five other sites, chosen according to Cameroon’s bioclimatic zoning. The results are satisfactory for the cities of Yokadouma and Kumba in the bimodal and monomodal rainfall zones, where overall accuracies are up to 98.9% and 97.5%, with kappa coefficients of 0.88 and 0.94 respectively, although these values are close to those of three other indices. However, in the cities of Foumban, Ngaoundéré and Garoua, representing the western highlands, the high Guinea savannah and the Sudano-sahelian zones where built-up is more confused with soil features, overall accuracies of 97.06%, 95.29% and 74.86%, corresponding to 0.918, 0.89 and 0.42 kappa coefficients were recorded. Difference of accuracy with EBBI, NDBI and UI are up to 31.66%, confirming the NDBSUI efficiency to automate built-up extraction and unmixing from surrounding noises with less biases.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 1744 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Maciel ◽  
Evlyn Novo ◽  
Lino Sander de Carvalho ◽  
Cláudio Barbosa ◽  
Rogério Flores Júnior ◽  
...  

Remote sensing imagery are fundamental to increasing the knowledge about sediment dynamics in the middle-lower Amazon floodplains. Moreover, they can help to understand both how climate change and how land use and land cover changes impact the sediment exchange between the Amazon River and floodplain lakes in this important and complex ecosystem. This study investigates the suitability of Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 spectral characteristics in retrieving total (TSS) and inorganic (TSI) suspended sediments on a set of Amazon floodplain lakes in the middle-lower Amazon basin using in situ Remote Sensing Reflectance (Rrs) measurements to simulate Landsat 8/OLI (Operational Land Imager) and Sentinel 2/MSI (Multispectral Instrument) bands and to calibrate/validate several TSS and TSI empirical algorithms. The calibration was based on the Monte Carlo Simulation carried out for the following datasets: (1) All-Dataset, consisting of all the data acquired during four field campaigns at five lakes spread over the lower Amazon floodplain (n = 94); (2) Campaign-Dataset including samples acquired in a specific hydrograph phase (season) in all lakes. As sample size varied from one season to the other, n varied from 18 to 31; (3) Lake-Dataset including samples acquired in all seasons at a given lake with n also varying from 17 to 67 for each lake. The calibrated models were, then, applied to OLI and MSI scenes acquired in August 2017. The performance of three atmospheric correction algorithms was also assessed for both OLI (6S, ACOLITE, and L8SR) and MSI (6S, ACOLITE, and Sen2Cor) images. The impact of glint correction on atmosphere-corrected image performance was assessed against in situ glint-corrected Rrs measurements. After glint correction, the L8SR and 6S atmospheric correction performed better with the OLI and MSI sensors, respectively (Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) = 16.68% and 14.38%) considering the entire set of bands. However, for a given single band, different methods have different performances. The validated TSI and TSS satellite estimates showed that both in situ TSI and TSS algorithms provided reliable estimates, having the best results for the green OLI band (561 nm) and MSI red-edge band (705 nm) (MAPE < 21%). Moreover, the findings indicate that the OLI and MSI models provided similar errors, which support the use of both sensors as a virtual constellation for the TSS and TSI estimate over an Amazon floodplain. These results demonstrate the applicability of the calibration/validation techniques developed for the empirical modeling of suspended sediments in lower Amazon floodplain lakes using medium-resolution sensors.


Forests ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 1073 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li ◽  
Li ◽  
Li ◽  
Liu

Forest biomass is a major store of carbon and plays a crucial role in the regional and global carbon cycle. Accurate forest biomass assessment is important for monitoring and mapping the status of and changes in forests. However, while remote sensing-based forest biomass estimation in general is well developed and extensively used, improving the accuracy of biomass estimation remains challenging. In this paper, we used China’s National Forest Continuous Inventory data and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager data in combination with three algorithms, either the linear regression (LR), random forest (RF), or extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), to establish biomass estimation models based on forest type. In the modeling process, two methods of variable selection, e.g., stepwise regression and variable importance-base method, were used to select optimal variable subsets for LR and machine learning algorithms (e.g., RF and XGBoost), respectively. Comfortingly, the accuracy of models was significantly improved, and thus the following conclusions were drawn: (1) Variable selection is very important for improving the performance of models, especially for machine learning algorithms, and the influence of variable selection on XGBoost is significantly greater than that of RF. (2) Machine learning algorithms have advantages in aboveground biomass (AGB) estimation, and the XGBoost and RF models significantly improved the estimation accuracy compared with the LR models. Despite that the problems of overestimation and underestimation were not fully eliminated, the XGBoost algorithm worked well and reduced these problems to a certain extent. (3) The approach of AGB modeling based on forest type is a very advantageous method for improving the performance at the lower and higher values of AGB. Some conclusions in this paper were probably different as the study area changed. The methods used in this paper provide an optional and useful approach for improving the accuracy of AGB estimation based on remote sensing data, and the estimation of AGB was a reference basis for monitoring the forest ecosystem of the study area.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (21) ◽  
pp. 3539
Author(s):  
Haifeng Tian ◽  
Jie Pei ◽  
Jianxi Huang ◽  
Xuecao Li ◽  
Jian Wang ◽  
...  

Garlic and winter wheat are major economic and grain crops in China, and their boundaries have increased substantially in recent decades. Updated and accurate garlic and winter wheat maps are critical for assessing their impacts on society and the environment. Remote sensing imagery can be used to monitor spatial and temporal changes in croplands such as winter wheat and maize. However, to our knowledge, few studies are focusing on garlic area mapping. Here, we proposed a method for coupling active and passive satellite imagery for the identification of both garlic and winter wheat in Northern China. First, we used passive satellite imagery (Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 images) to extract winter crops (garlic and winter wheat) with high accuracy. Second, we applied active satellite imagery (Sentinel-1 images) to distinguish garlic from winter wheat. Third, we generated a map of the garlic and winter wheat by coupling the above two classification results. For the evaluation of classification, the overall accuracy was 95.97%, with a kappa coefficient of 0.94 by eighteen validation quadrats (3 km by 3 km). The user’s and producer’s accuracies of garlic are 95.83% and 95.85%, respectively; and for the winter wheat, these two accuracies are 97.20% and 97.45%, respectively. This study provides a practical exploration of targeted crop identification in mixed planting areas using multisource remote sensing data.


Terr Plural ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Isadora Taborda Silva ◽  
Jéssica Rabito Chaves ◽  
Helen Rezende Figueiredo ◽  
Bruno Silva Ferreira ◽  
César Claudio Cáceres Encina ◽  
...  

This paper evaluates the potential of false-color composite images, from 3 different remote sensing satellites, for the identification of continental wetlands. Landsat 8, Sentinel-2 and CBERS-4 scenes from three different Ramsar sites (i.e., sites designated to be of international importance) two sites located within the Mato-Grossense Pantanal and one within the Sul-mato-grossense were used for analyses. For each site, images from both the dry and rainy seasons were analyzed using Near-Infrared (NIR), Shortwave Infrared (SWIR), and visible (VIS) bands. The results show that false-color composite images from both the Landsat 8 and the Sentinel-2 satellites, with both SWIR 2-NIR-BLUE and NIR-SWIR-RED spectral band combinations, allow the identification of wetlands.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikias Biazen Molla

Abstract This investigation was conducted for the estimation of the temporal land surface temperature value using thermal remote sensing of Landsat-8 (OLI) Data in Hawassa City Administration, Ethiopia. Satellite datasets of Landsat-7 (ETM+) for 22nd March 2002 and Landsat-8 (OLI) of 22nd March 2019 were taken for this study. Different algorisms were used to estimate the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index threshold from the Red and Near-Infrared band and the ground earth's surface emissivity esteem is legitimately recovered from the thermal infrared by coordinating with the outcome got from MODIS information. The land use land cover map of the city was prepared with better accuracy using the on-screen classification technique. The spatial distribution of surface temperature of the city range from 6.62°C to 22.54°C with a mean of 14.58°C and a standard deviation of 11.25 in the year of march 22nd 2002. The LST result derived from Landsat 8 for March 22nd, 2019, ranges from 11.97°C to 35.5°C with a mean of 23.735 °C and a standard deviation of 16.64. In both years the higher LST values correspond to built-up/settlement and bare/open lands of the city; whereas, lower LST values were observed in vegetation (trees/woodlot, shrubs, and grass forested) area. Urban expansion (built-up area roads, and another impervious surface), decline in vegetation levels due to deforestation and increasing population density. Increasing an evergreen tree and green space coverage, design and develop city parks and rehabilitate the existing degraded natural environments are among the recommended strategy to reduce the rate of LST.


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