Using unmanned aerial vehicles for high-resolution remote sensing to map invasive Phragmites australis in coastal wetlands

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ABSTRACTThe wetland plant species, Phragmites australis, is present on every continent except Antarctica. Both native and non-native subspecies thrive in the USA with the non-natives quickly displacing native wetland plants. Along the Gulf Coast, Phragmites grows in very dense stands, and at heights of greater than 4.6 m, is usually the tallest grass species in a wetland, estuary, and marsh ecosystems. Phragmites is known to alter the ecology of these wetland systems making them less suitable as habitat for many species of flora and fauna. Furthermore, Phragmites presents a navigation hazard to smaller boats by impairing visibility along shorelines and around bends of canals and rivers. Management efforts targeting non-native Phragmites rely heavily on accurately mapping invaded areas. Historically, mapping has been done through walking the perimeter of a stand with a Global Positioning System (GPS) unit, using satellite imagery, or through the use of aerial photography from manned aircraft. These methods are time consuming, are expensive, can have an inadequate resolution, and in some cases are prone to human error. In this work, an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) was used to capture visible imagery to create a basin-wide distribution map of a large wetland along the US Pearl River delta in southeastern Louisiana. The imagery was collected in the summer and individual images were mosaicked to create a larger map. We then evaluated the use of texture analysis on the mosaics to automatically map the invasive. Specifically, Gabor filters, grey level co-occurrence matrices, segmentation-based fractal texture analysis, and wavelet-based texture analysis were compared for mapping the Phragmites. Our experimental results, conducted using the imagery we collected over four study areas (approximately 2250 ha) along the US Pearl River delta, indicate the proposed texture-based approach yields an average accuracy of 85%, an average kappa accuracy of 70%. These maps have shown to be very useful for resource managers to hasten the eradication efforts of Phragmites.