Abstract
Grasslands, as an important part of terrestrial ecosystems, are facing serious threats of land degradation. Therefore, the remote monitoring of grasslands is an important tool to control degradation and protect grasslands. However, the existing methods are often disturbed by clouds and fog, which makes it difficult to achieve all-weather and all-time grassland remote sensing monitoring. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data can penetrate clouds, which is helpful for solving this problem. In this study, we verified the advantages of the fusion of multi-spectral (MS) and SAR data for improving classification accuracy, especially for cloud-covered areas. We also proposed an adaptive feature fusion method (the SK-like method) based on an attention mechanism, and tested two types of patch construction strategies, single-size and multi-size patches. Experiments have shown that the proposed SK-like method with single-size patches obtains the best results, with 93.12% accuracy and a 0.91 average f1-score, which is a 1.02% accuracy improvement and a 0.01 average f1-score improvement compared with the commonly used feature concatenation method. Our results show that the all-weather, all-time remote sensing monitoring of grassland is possible through the fusion of MS and SAR data with suitable feature fusion methods, which will effectively enhance the regulatory capability of grassland resources.
Highlights
Grasslands are an important part of terrestrial ecosystems
We propose an adaptive feature fusion method based on the attention mechanism in order to fuse MS and Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images better and improve the classification accuracy and resistance against cloud interference
We used MS and SAR data for multi-source data fusion and proposed an adaptive feature fusion method based on the attention mechanism
Summary
Grasslands are an important part of terrestrial ecosystems. The Pilot Analysis of GlobalEcosystems (PAGE) is a study conducted by the World Resources Institute, which “examines grassland ecosystems of the world using a large collection of spatial and temporal data” [1].It shows that the world’s grasslands cover a total area of 52.5 million km , accounting for 40.5% of the Earth’s total terrestrial area (excluding Greenland and Antarctica), store34% of the total carbon in terrestrial ecosystems, maintain 30% of net primary productivity and provide about 30–50% of the world’s livestock products. Grasslands are an important part of terrestrial ecosystems. Ecosystems (PAGE) is a study conducted by the World Resources Institute, which “examines grassland ecosystems of the world using a large collection of spatial and temporal data” [1]. It shows that the world’s grasslands cover a total area of 52.5 million km , accounting for 40.5% of the Earth’s total terrestrial area (excluding Greenland and Antarctica), store. 34% of the total carbon in terrestrial ecosystems, maintain 30% of net primary productivity and provide about 30–50% of the world’s livestock products. More than 23% of the global terrestrial area is affected by degradation, with grassland being the main type of area affected.
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