Abstract
This paper presents a collective sensing approach that integrates imperfect Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) obtained through Citizen Science (CS) tree mapping projects with very high resolution (VHR) optical remotely sensed data for low-cost, fine-scale, and accurate mapping of trees in urban orchards. To this end, an individual tree crown (ITC) detection technique utilizing template matching (TM) was developed for extracting urban orchard trees from VHR optical imagery. To provide the training samples for the TM algorithm, remotely sensed VGI about trees including the crowdsourced data about ITC locations and their crown diameters was adopted in this study. A data quality assessment of the proposed approach in the study area demonstrated that the detected trees had a very high degree of completeness (92.7%), a high thematic accuracy (false discovery rate (FDR) = 0.090, false negative rate (FNR) = 0.073, and F1 score (F1) = 0.918), and a fair positional accuracy (root mean square error(RMSE) = 1.02 m). Overall, the proposed approach based on the crowdsourced training samples generally demonstrated a promising ITC detection performance in our pilot project.
Highlights
The various ecological, social, and economic benefits of tree orchards in urban environments have been discussed extensively in previous studies [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
This study proposed a collective sensing approach incorporating Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and very high resolution (VHR) optical remotely sensed data for the mapping of individual trees in urban orchards
The promising individual tree crown (ITC) detection performance of the template matching (TM)-Citizen Science (CS) approach in this pilot project and the necessity of developing low-cost and accurate fine-scale mapping approaches for constructing large-scale inventories of urban orchard trees justify the need for further large-scale studies in this area
Summary
The various ecological, social, and economic benefits of tree orchards in urban environments have been discussed extensively in previous studies [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Compared to public green spaces, the trees in urban orchards are often surrounded by physical barriers (e.g., walls or fences) This isolated and unexposed nature of urban orchards can limit the possibilities for authoritative and public ground-based observation supervision, and the majority of the damage to (e.g., due to poor maintenance of the orchard) and (potentially illegal) destruction of the orchards may go undetected by the urban authorities and citizens. To protect and maintain urban trees and estimate their ecosystem services, the municipality of Mashhad has established a conventional tree inventory database through field surveys and tagging trees using metal labels The coverage of this inventory program is currently limited to survey the trees in the public green spaces. The limited accessibility of the trees on private property prevented the authorities from expanding the extent of the current tree inventory program to include the trees located in private urban orchards
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