scholarly journals Mapping Mangrove Forests of Dongzhaigang Nature Reserve in China Using Landsat 8 and Radarsat-2 Polarimetric SAR Data

Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (11) ◽  
pp. 4012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianing Zhen ◽  
Jingjuan Liao ◽  
Guozhuang Shen

Mangrove forests are distributed in intertidal regions that act as a “natural barrier” to the coast. They have enormous ecological, economic, and social value. However, the world’s mangrove forests are declining under immense pressure from anthropogenic and natural disturbances. Accurate information regarding mangrove forests is essential for their protection and restoration. The main objective of this study was to develop a method to improve the classification of mangrove forests using C-band quad-pol Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data (Radarsat-2) and optical data (Landsat 8), and to analyze the spectral and backscattering signatures of mangrove forests. We used a support vector machine (SVM) classification method to classify the land use in Hainan Dongzhaigang National Nature Reserve (HDNNR). The results showed that the overall accuracy using only optical information was 83.5%. Classification accuracy was improved to a varying extent by the addition of different radar data. The highest overall accuracy was 95.0% based on a combination of SAR and optical data. The area of mangrove forest in the reserve was found to be 1981.7 ha, as determined from the group with the highest classification accuracy. Combining optical data with SAR data could improve the classification accuracy and be significant for mangrove forest conservation.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei Wang ◽  
Haoran Sun ◽  
Wenjun Li ◽  
Liang Zhou

<p>Crop planting structure is of great significance to the quantitative management of agricultural water and the accurate estimation of crop yield. With the increasing spatial and temporal resolution of remote sensing optical and SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) images,  efficient crop mapping in large area becomes possible and the accuracy is improved. In this study, Qingyijiang Irrigation District in southwest of China is selected for crop identification methods comparison, which has heterogeneous terrain and complex crop structure . Multi-temporal optical (Sentinel-2) and SAR (Sentinel-1) data were used to calculate NDVI and backscattering coefficient as the main classification indexes. The multi-spectral and SAR data showed significant change in different stages of the whole crop growth period and varied with different crop types. Spatial distribution and texture analysis was also made. Classification using different combinations of indexes were performed using neural network, support vector machine and random forest method. The results showed that, the use of multi-temporal optical data and SAR data in the key growing periods of main crops can both provide satisfactory classification accuracy. The overall classification accuracy was greater than 82% and Kappa coefficient was greater than 0.8. SAR data has high accuracy and much potential in rice identification. However optical data had more accuracy in upland crops classification. In addition, the classification accuracy can be effectively improved by combination of classification indexes from optical and SAR data, the overall accuracy was up to 91.47%. The random forest method was superior to the other two methods in terms of the overall accuracy and the kappa coefficient.</p>


2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 179
Author(s):  
Matthew G. Hethcoat ◽  
João M. B. Carreiras ◽  
Robert G. Bryant ◽  
Shaun Quegan ◽  
David P. Edwards

Tropical forests play a key role in the global carbon and hydrological cycles, maintaining biological diversity, slowing climate change, and supporting the global economy and local livelihoods. Yet, rapidly growing populations are driving continued degradation of tropical forests to supply wood products. The United Nations (UN) has developed the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme to mitigate climate impacts and biodiversity losses through improved forest management. Consistent and reliable systems are still needed to monitor tropical forests at large scales, however, degradation has largely been left out of most REDD+ reporting given the lack of effective monitoring and countries mainly focus on deforestation. Recent advances in combining optical data and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data have shown promise for improved ability to monitor forest losses, but it remains unclear if similar improvements could be made in detecting and mapping forest degradation. We used detailed selective logging records from three lowland tropical forest regions in the Brazilian Amazon to test the effectiveness of combining Landsat 8 and Sentinel-1 for selective logging detection. We built Random Forest models to classify pixel-based differences in logged and unlogged regions to understand if combining optical and SAR improved the detection capabilities over optical data alone. We found that the classification accuracy of models utilizing optical data from Landsat 8 alone were slightly higher than models that combined Sentinel-1 and Landsat 8. In general, detection of selective logging was high with both optical only and optical-SAR combined models, but our results show that the optical data was dominating the predictive performance and adding SAR data introduced noise, lowering the detection of selective logging. While we have shown limited capabilities with C-band SAR, the anticipated opening of the ALOS-PALSAR archives and the anticipated launch of NISAR and BIOMASS in 2023 should stimulate research investigating similar methods to understand if longer wavelength SAR might improve classification of areas affected by selective logging when combined with optical data.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (19) ◽  
pp. 5356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liao ◽  
Zhen ◽  
Zhang ◽  
Metternicht

Implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals requires countries to determine targets for the protection, conservation, or restoration of coastal ecosystems such as mangrove forests by 2030. Satellite remote sensing provides historical and current data on the distribution and dynamics of mangrove forests, essential baseline data that are needed to design suitable policy interventions. In this study, Landsat time series were used to map trends and dynamics of mangrove change over a time span of 30 years (1987–2017) in protected areas of Hainan Island (China). A support vector machine algorithm was combined with visual interpretation of imagery and result showed alternating periods of expansion and loss of mangrove forest at seven selected sites on Hainan Island. Over this period, there was a net decrease in mangrove area of 9.3%, with anthropic activities such as land conversion for aquaculture, wastewater disposal and discharge, and tourism development appearing to be the likely drivers of this decline in cover. Long-term studies examining trends in land use cover change coupled with assessments of drivers of loss or gain enable the development of evidence based on policy and legislation. This forms the basis of financing of natural reserves of management and institutional capacity building, and facilitates public awareness and participation, including co-management.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 32-37
Author(s):  
Jwan AL-Doski ◽  
Shattri B. Mansor ◽  
H'ng Paik San ◽  
Zailani Khuzaimah

The topographic impact may change the radiance values captured by the spacecraft sensors, resulting in distinct reflectance value for similar land cover classes and mischaracterization. The problem can be more clearly seen in rugged terrain landscapes than in flat terrains, such as the mountainous areas. In order to minimize topographic impacts, we suggested the implementation of Modified Sun-Canopy-Sensor Correction (SCS+C) technique to generate land cover maps in Gua Musang district which is located in a rugged mountainous terrain area in Kelantan state, Malaysia using an atmospherically corrected Landsat 8 imagery captured on 22 April 2014 by Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm. The results showed that the SCS+C method reduces the topographic effect particularly in such a steep and forested terrain with classification accuracy improvement about 4% which was statistically significantly with the McNemar test value Z and P measured 6.42 and 0.0001 on the corrected image classification90.1%accuracy compared to the uncorrected image86.2%for the test area. Thus, the topographic correction is suggested to be the main step of the data pre-processing stage in mountainous terrain before SVM image classification


Author(s):  
M. Ustuner ◽  
F. B. Sanli ◽  
S. Abdikan ◽  
M. T. Esetlili ◽  
G. Bilgin

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Crops are dynamically changing and time-critical in the growing season and therefore multitemporal earth observation data are needed for spatio-temporal monitoring of the crops. This study evaluates the impacts of classical roll-invariant polarimetric features such as entropy (H), anisotropy (A), mean alpha angle (<span style="text-decoration: overline">&amp;alpha;</span>) and total scattering power (SPAN) for the crop classification from multitemporal polarimetric SAR data. For this purpose, five different data set were generated as following: (1) H<span style="text-decoration: overline">&amp;alpha;</span>, (2) H<span style="text-decoration: overline">&amp;alpha;</span>Span, (3) H<span style="text-decoration: overline">&amp;alpha;</span>A, (4) H<span style="text-decoration: overline">&amp;alpha;</span>ASpan and (5) coherency [<i>T</i>] matrix. A time-series of four PolSAR data (Radarsat-2) were acquired as 13 June, 01 July, 31 July and 24 August in 2016 for the test site located in Konya, Turkey. The test site is covered with crops (maize, potato, summer wheat, sunflower, and alfalfa). For the classification of the data set, three different models were used as following: Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Random Forests (RFs) and Naive Bayes (NB). The experimental results highlight that H&amp;alpha;ASpan (91.43<span class="thinspace"></span>% for SVM, 92.25<span class="thinspace"></span>% for RF and 90.55<span class="thinspace"></span>% for NB) outperformed all other data sets in terms of classification performance, which explicitly proves the significant contribution of SPAN for the discrimination of crops. Highest classification accuracy was obtained as 92.25<span class="thinspace"></span>% by RF and H&amp;alpha;ASpan while lowest classification accuracy was obtained as 66.99<span class="thinspace"></span>% by NB and H&amp;alpha;. This experimental study suggests that roll-invariant polarimetric features can be considered as the powerful polarimetric components for the crop classification. In addition, the findings prove the added benefits of PolSAR data investigation by means of crop classification.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (22) ◽  
pp. 3729
Author(s):  
Leon T. Hauser ◽  
Nguyen An Binh ◽  
Pham Viet Hoa ◽  
Nguyen Hong Quan ◽  
Joris Timmermans

Ecosystem services offered by mangrove forests are facing severe risks, particularly through land use change driven by human development. Remote sensing has become a primary instrument to monitor the land use dynamics surrounding mangrove ecosystems. Where studies formerly relied on bi-temporal assessments of change, the practical limitations concerning data-availability and processing power are slowly disappearing with the onset of high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud-computing services, such as in the Google Earth Engine (GEE). This paper combines the capabilities of GEE, including its entire Landsat-7 and Landsat-8 archives and state-of-the-art classification approaches, with a post-classification temporal analysis to optimize land use classification results into gap-free and consistent information. The results demonstrate its application and value to uncover the spatio-temporal dynamics of mangrove forests and land use changes in Ngoc Hien District, Ca Mau province, Vietnamese Mekong delta. The combination of repeated GEE classification output and post-classification optimization provides valid spatial classification (94–96% accuracy) and temporal interpolation (87–92% accuracy). The findings reveal that the net change of mangroves forests over the 2001–2019 period equals −0.01% annually. The annual gap-free maps enable spatial identification of hotspots of mangrove forest changes, including deforestation and degradation. Post-classification temporal optimization allows for an exploitation of temporal patterns to synthesize and enhance independent classifications towards more robust gap-free spatial maps that are temporally consistent with logical land use transitions. The study contributes to a growing body of work advocating full exploitation of temporal information in optimizing land cover classification and demonstrates its use for mangrove forest monitoring.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 749
Author(s):  
Yang Lei ◽  
Alex Gardner ◽  
Piyush Agram

In this paper, we build on past efforts with regard to the implementation of an efficient feature tracking algorithm for the mass processing of satellite images. This generic open-source feature tracking routine can be applied to any type of imagery to measure sub-pixel displacements between images. The routine consists of a feature tracking module (autoRIFT) that enhances computational efficiency and a geocoding module (Geogrid) that mitigates problems found in existing geocoding algorithms. When applied to satellite imagery, autoRIFT can run on a grid in the native image coordinates (such as radar or map) and, when used in conjunction with the Geogrid module, on a user-defined grid in geographic Cartesian coordinates such as Universal Transverse Mercator or Polar Stereographic. To validate the efficiency and accuracy of this approach, we demonstrate its use for tracking ice motion by using ESA’s Sentinel-1A/B radar data (seven pairs) and NASA’s Landsat-8 optical data (seven pairs) collected over Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbræ glacier in 2017. Feature-tracked velocity errors are characterized over stable surfaces, where the best Sentinel-1A/B pair with a 6 day separation has errors in X/Y of 12 m/year or 39 m/year, compared to 22 m/year or 31 m/year for Landsat-8 with a 16-day separation. Different error sources for radar and optical image pairs are investigated, where the seasonal variation and the error dependence on the temporal baseline are analyzed. Estimated velocities were compared with reference velocities derived from DLR’s TanDEM-X SAR/InSAR data over the fast-moving glacier outlet, where Sentinel-1 results agree within 4% compared to 3–7% for Landsat-8. A comprehensive apples-to-apples comparison is made with regard to runtime and accuracy between multiple implementations of the proposed routine and the widely-used “dense ampcor" program from NASA/JPL’s ISCE software. autoRIFT is shown to provide two orders of magnitude of runtime improvement with a 20% improvement in accuracy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 243
Author(s):  
Amal Chakhar ◽  
David Hernández-López ◽  
Rocío Ballesteros ◽  
Miguel A. Moreno

The availability of an unprecedented amount of open remote sensing data, such as Sentinel-1 and -2 data within the Copernicus program, has boosted the idea of combining the use of optical and radar data to improve the accuracy of agricultural applications such as crop classification. Sentinel-1’s Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides co- and cross-polarized backscatter, which offers the opportunity to monitor agricultural crops using radar at high spatial and temporal resolution. In this study, we assessed the potential of integrating Sentinel-1 information (VV and VH backscatter and their ratio VH/VV with Sentinel-2A data (NDVI) to perform crop classification and to define which are the most important input data that provide the most accurate classification results. Further, we examined the temporal dynamics of remote sensing data for cereal, horticultural, and industrial crops, perennials, deciduous trees, and legumes. To select the best SAR input feature, we tried two approaches, one based on classification with only SAR features and one based on integrating SAR with optical data. In total, nine scenarios were tested. Furthermore, we evaluated the performance of 22 nonparametric classifiers on which most of these algorithms had not been tested before with SAR data. The results revealed that the best performing scenario was the one integrating VH and VV with normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and cubic support vector machine (SVM) (the kernel function of the classifier is cubic) as the classifier with the highest accuracy among all those tested.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 367
Author(s):  
Edson E. Sano ◽  
Paola Rizzoli ◽  
Christian N. Koyama ◽  
Manabu Watanabe ◽  
Marcos Adami ◽  
...  

Global-scale forest/non-forest (FNF) maps are of crucial importance for applications like biomass estimation and deforestation monitoring. Global FNF maps based on optical remote sensing data have been produced by the wall-to-wall satellite image analyses or sampling strategies. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) also made available their global FNF maps based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. This paper attempted to answer the following scientific question: how comparable are the FNF products derived from optical and SAR data? As test sites we selected the Amazon (tropical rainforest) and Cerrado (tropical savanna) biomes, the two largest Brazilian biomes. Forest estimations from 2015 derived from TanDEM-X (X band; HH polarization) and ALOS-2 (L band; HV polarization) SAR data, as well as forest cover information derived from Landsat 8 optical data were compared with each other at the municipality and image sampling levels. The optical-based forest estimations considered in this study were derived from the MapBiomas project, a Brazilian multi-institutional project to map land use and land cover (LULC) classes of an entire country based on historical time series of Landsat data. In addition to the existing forest maps, a set of 1619 Landsat 8 RGB color composites was used to generate new independent comparison data composed of circular areas with 5-km diameter, which were visually interpreted after image segmentation. The Spearman rank correlation estimated the correlation among the data sets and the paired Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxon tested the hypothesis that the data sets are statistically equal. Results showed that forest maps derived from SAR and optical satellites are statistically different regardless of biome or scale of study (municipality or image sampling), except for the Cerrado´s forest estimations derived from TanDEM-X and ALOS-2. Nevertheless, the percentage of pixels classified as forest or non-forest by both SAR sensors were 90% and 80% for the Amazon and Cerrado biome, respectively, indicating an overall good agreement.


Author(s):  
M. Iyyappan ◽  
S. S. Ramakrishnan ◽  
K. Srinivasa Raju

The study about on landuse and landcover classification using multi polarization and multi temporal C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data of recently launched multi-mode of RISAT-1 (Radar Imaging Satellite) by Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and European satellite, Envisat ASAR data. The backscattering coefficient were extracted for various land features from Cband SAR data. The training sample collecting from satellite optical imagery of study and field visit for verification. The training samples are used for the supervised classification technique of maximum Likelihood (ML) algorithms, Neural Network (NN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms were applied for fourteen different polarizations combination of multi temporal and multiple polarizations. The previous study was carried only four band combination of RISAT 1 data, the continuation of work both SAR data were used in this study. The Classification results are verified with confusion matrix. The pixel based classification gives the good results in the dual polarization of CRS &ndash; HH and HV of RISAT &minus;1 compared to dual polarization Envisat ASAR data. Meanwhile the quad Polarization combination of Envisat ASAR data got better classification accuracy. The SVM classifiers has given better classification results for all band combination followed by ML and NN. The Scrub are better identified in EnviSat ASAR &ndash; VV & VH Polarization and Plantation are better identified in EnviSat ASAR &ndash; HH, HH-HV & HV Polarization. The classification accuracy of both Scrub and Plantation is about 80 % in EnviSat ASAR &ndash; HH, VH & VV Polarization combination.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document