Abstract
Wetlands are endangered ecosystems that provide vital habitats for flora and fauna worldwide. They serve as water and carbon storage units regulating the global climate and water cycle, and act as natural barriers against storm-surge among other benefits. Long-term analyses are crucial to identify wetland cover change and support wetland protection/restoration programs. However, such analyses deal with insufficient validation data that limit land cover classification and pattern recognition tasks. Here, we analyze wetland dynamics associated with urbanization, sea level rise, and hurricane impacts in the Mobile Bay watershed, AL since 1984. For this, we develop a land cover classification model with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and data fusion (DF) framework. The classification model achieves the highest overall accuracy (0.93), and f1-scores in woody (0.90) and emergent wetland class (0.99) when those datasets are fused in the framework. Long-term trends indicate that the wetland area is decreasing at a rate of –1106 m2/yr with sharp fluctuations exacerbated by hurricane impacts. We further discuss the effects of DF alternatives on classification accuracy, and show that the CNN & DF framework outperforms machine/deep learning models trained only with single input datasets.
Highlights
W ETLANDS are defined as lands transitional between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems [1] that provide valuable services to society [2]
Our results show a decreasing trend of total wetland area [see Fig. 6(a)] and a more frequent emergent wetland loss than gain in annual basis and five-year intervals, we infer that discrepancies with the results of Alizad et al, [17] are associated with study area extent differences (e.g., Mobile Bay watershed versus Weeks Bay) and the fact that both urban development and hurricane impacts were not included in their analysis
We investigated wetland dynamics in Mobile Bay watershed, AL associated with urban development, sea level rise (SLR), and hurricane impacts between 1984 and 2019
Summary
W ETLANDS are defined as lands transitional between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems [1] that provide valuable services to society [2]. Among those services, wetlands improve water quality due to their capacity for nutrient and pollutant removal [3], [4]. Wetlands regulate the global climate through carbon sequestration and methane emissions [5]–[7], and . Manuscript received October 14, 2020; revised December 16, 2020; accepted December 29, 2020. Date of publication January 1, 2021; date of current version January 21, 2021.
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