Large-scale vegetation assessments in southern Africa: concepts and applications using multi-source remote sensing data

TL;DRAbstract

The interdisciplinary project structure of BIOTA Southern Africa opened the opportunity for applying integrated concepts for the spatiotemporal assessment of arid and semi-arid southern African ecosystems, including the characterization of inter-annual vegetation dynamics and large-scale land cover mapping. Due to existing high uncertainties in mapping arid and semi-arid environments, the studies on remote sensing-based vegetation mapping aimed to develop and apply land cover classifi cation techniques to derive adapted and standardized maps covering large areas along the BIOTA transect. The application
\nof machine learning classifi cation and regression techniques proved to be useful for both fractional and categorical semi-arid land cover mapping. Key improvements were achieved by mapping vegetation types in Namibia on a national scale using time series data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging
\nSpectroradiometer (MODIS). Synergies of multitemporal remote sensing and botani

Chat with Paper

AI Agents for this Paper