Estimating soil organic carbon using UAV and Sentinel-2 images and multilayer perceptron regression in Coastal Wetland

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ABSTRACT Hyperspectral imagery from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has been used to predict soil organic carbon (SOC) content. This study compared UAV hyperspectral imagery with Sentinel-2A multispectral imagery and soil spectra in the laboratory to predict the SOC content in Suaeda salsa (S. salsa) coastal wetland. Characteristic variables were determined through correlation analysis comparing observed SOC with constructed spectral indices of SOC, index variables, and spectral bands. Predict Models of SOC were constructed by multilayer perceptron (MLP), the prediction accuracy was evaluated and the spatial maps of SOC were produced. The results showed that estimating SOC using UAV, Sentinel imagery, and laboratory spectra has great potential when using MLP algorithm. The SOC content can be accurately predicted by the laboratory spectra without spatial map. The accuracy of SOC estimation was better when based on Sentinel-2A imagery than UAV imagery, with the model determination coefficients (R 2) of 0.838 and 0.638, the root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.398 and 0.596 g kg−1, ratio of performance to deviations (RPD) of 2.485 and 1.660, and bias of − 0.028 and 0.085 g kg−1, respectively. The SOC estimation model using Sentinel-2A imagery demonstrated better stability than that using UAV imagery, with the mean uncertainty standard deviations (SD) of 0.226 and 0.291 g kg−1, respectively. The spatial SOC maps generated from both UAV and Sentinel-2A imagery presented more subtle variation information when compared with the spatial interpolation results. Although the prediction accuracy of SOC from UAV was lower than that from Sentinel-2A, UAV imagery could disclose more fine distribution information of SOC at the local level. The UAV imagery can be used to estimate SOC in coastal wetlands but with a higher cost than freely available Sentinel images. We recommend using sentinel imagery to predict SOC at regional, national, or even global levels.