Abstract
Abstract. The main objective of the current study was to produce an accurate map of date palm (DP) plantations in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in United Arab Emirates (UAE) using moderate resolution Landsat-8 (OLI) imagery. The second objective was to be able to create a more detailed map depicting three different categories of date palms at three different age stages: young, medium, and mature. This was achieved using a hierarchical integrated approach: first, Landsat-8 OLI imagery were used to map mature date palms in the study area; second, an object oriented classification (OOC) approach was applied at the plantation level using sub-meter Worldview-2 imagery (WV-2) to depict and map medium and young aged palms. Three age-stage categories of date palms were mapped with acceptable accuracy. The primary outcome of this classification approach was the creation of detailed maps of date palms to be used as input to a remote sensing (RS) based biomass estimation model for the assessment of the above ground biomass (AGB) and carbon sequestered (CS) of date palms. Results were validated using existing ancillary data and field checks. DP were mapped with an overall accuracy of 94.5% which was considered high in similar conditions of drylands, while the overall kappa statistics was estimated at 0.888.
Highlights
Mapping vegetation for accurate measuring of biomass is a serious problem that must be resolved when quantifying carbon stock
In order to reduce the size of Worldview-2 imagery (WV-2) images for further processing, the vegetated areas were subset from each WV-2 scene
The adopted approach was very successful in mapping mature date palm plantations while the results with young palm were more challenging due to their sparse structure bringing more soil background contribution to the DP signatures
Summary
Mapping vegetation for accurate measuring of biomass is a serious problem that must be resolved when quantifying carbon stock. Using satellite images to map and correlate environmental factors is only possible if the target vegetation spectra are strong enough to be identified within the pixel, which is the case only in some dryland environments(Aly et al, 2016; Tian et al, 2016). This latter requirement presents a major challenge in desert where vegetation is usually sparse, offering a small spectral target that requires higher resolutions to be detected(Bradley et al, 2019). By using the pansharpened WV-2 images (spatial resolution 0.5 meter), date palm (DP) crowns can be differentiated from the background (soils, grasses, and weeds) and other shrubs and trees using colour, tone, texture, size and planting arrangement
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