Natural hazards and land management issues can benefit nowadays from the increasing availability of free, high-resolution satellite imagery that opens the way to fine scale detailed investigations. In high elevation catchments the analysis of vegetation dynamics deserves particular attention since little climatic modifications can be amplified in such fragile systems. For the same reasons, the ...

The characterization and evaluation of the recent status of biodiversity in Southern Africa’s Savannas is a major prerequisite for suitable and sustainable land management and conservation purposes. This paper presents an integrated concept for vegetation type mapping in a dry savanna ecosystem based on local scale in-situ botanical survey data with high resolution (Landsat) and coarse resoluti...

Mapping for biodiversity informatics requires information on habitat so that known species occurrences may be extrapolated to maps of potential species occurrences. In the case of vegetation requirements for habitat, most current datasets of actual vegetation have been derived from optical (e.g. aerial photography or Landsat) remotely sensed data. These data are largely limited to describing ho...

In Australia, remotely sensed Landsat TM data is routinely used for mapping and monitoring the change in extent of woody perennial vegetation cover providing information for conservation, land management and for modelling carbon flux and water use. For a variety of reasons including land cover definitions and sensor spectral limitations, studies have tended to focus on reporting changes in land...

Incorporating ecological information into image-based vegetation mapping remains a challenge. Much attention has been placed on the use of ancillary information layers in image classification (e.g. slope, aspect, elevation) in that they provide indirect links to information that is ecologically relevant to species distributions. The objective of this study was to assess the utility of incorpora...

Remote sensing of the structural and spectral traits of vegetation is being transformed by structure from motion (SFM) algorithms that combine overlapping images to produce three-dimensional (3D) red-green-blue (RGB) point clouds. However, much remains unknown about how these point clouds are used to observe vegetation, limiting the understanding of the results and future applications. Here, we...

A major challenge in hydrologic modeling remains the mapping of vegetation dynamics in an urban landscape. The impact of vegetation on interception storage varies over time and needs to be quantified in order to enable proper management of water resources in urban areas. However, the heterogeneity and complexity of the urban landscape makes it challenging to monitor urban vegetation. A more det...

Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most commonly adopted feature reduction techniques in remote sensing image analysis. However, it may overlook subtle but useful information if directly applied to the analysis of hyperspectral data, especially for the discrimination among different vegetation types. In order to accurately map an invasive plant species (horse tamarind, Leucaena le...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Low-elevation surveys with small aerial drones (micro-unmanned aerial vehicles [UAVs]) may be used for a wide variety of applications in plant ecology, including mapping vegetation over small- to medium-sized regions. We provide an overview of methods and procedures for conducting surveys and illustrate some of these applications. METHODS Aerial images were obtained by fl...

Aquatic vegetation plays an important role in maintaining the balance of lake ecosystems. Thus, classifying and mapping aquatic vegetation is a priority for lake management. Classification tree (CT) approaches have been used successfully to map aquatic vegetation from spectral indices obtained from remotely sensed images. However, due to the effects of extrinsic and intrinsic factors, applying ...