Abstract
Nowadays the use of remote sensing for vegetation mapping over large areas is becoming progressively common, with the increase of satellites providing a good trade-off between metric spatial resolution and large swath (e.g. Spot 5, RapidEye). In France, the government launched an ambitious project to map all terrestrial habitats of the national territory. — Thus, CarHAB project uses remote sensing technology to support field work and ground observations for vegetation mapping in support to the 11 National Botanical Conservatories working on the whole of French territory. For this purpose, a physiognomic typology has been produced. This typology captures the intrinsic structure of vegetation and potentially its land use. In order to improve semantic and geometric accuracy of the vegetation cover, the use of infra-metric imagery, such as the ones provided by Pléiades constellation offer valuable insights. This imagery offers visual and geometric potentialities closed to aerial photos but with the advantage of better spectral information. Results presented in this research focus on physiognomic mapping of natural and semi-natural vegetation of pasture, grasslands and farmland areas in Isere Department in France. The potentialities of Pléiades imagery are demonstrated by evaluating separability capabilities of textural analysis of woody and herbaceous habitats and vegetation associated to screes.
Highlights
One of the most crucial phases of vegetation mapping concerns the physiognomic-ecological characterization
The mean and standard deviation of texture features are respectively located on the right and on the left of the chart while SFS and Haralick features are respectively on the lower part
Future products from the Sentinel constellation piloted by ESA open possibilities for innovative applications with better capabilities as the one tested within the framework of this work. These results suggest that texture features extracted from Pléiades imagery, from the very high spatial resolution of the panchromatic band (i.e. 0.5 m), can drastically improve the recognition of some complex physiognomies, that are highly correlated to ecological indicators
Summary
One of the most crucial phases of vegetation mapping concerns the physiognomic-ecological characterization. This time consuming identification of homogenous regions, can greatly benefit from Earth observationbased maps based on automatic classification techniques (Langanke et al, 2007; Wang et al, 2010). Physiognomy (i.e. recovery rate of vegetation, biomass and morphology) seems to be the most discriminant parameter, using remote sensing data, to identify different types of habitats present in relatively large, spatially contiguous, units. The resulting maps have the capacity to locate broad physiognomic types, but still well-known confusions will persist between woody, herbaceous and shrubby habitats for a same biomass level. The sub-metric spatial resolution, as the one, provided by Pléiades, represents a promising potential for a more accurate vegetation mapping
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: Revue Française de Photogrammétrie et de Télédétection
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
