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Modeling salt marsh vegetation height using unoccupied aircraft systems and structure from motion

Publication ,  Journal Article
DiGiacomo, AE; Bird, CN; Pan, VG; Dobroski, K; Atkins-Davis, C; Johnston, DW; Ridge, JT
Published in: Remote Sensing
July 1, 2020

Salt marshes provide important services to coastal ecosystems in the southeastern United States. In many locations, salt marsh habitats are threatened by coastal development and erosion, necessitating large-scale monitoring. Assessing vegetation height across the extent of a marsh can provide a comprehensive analysis of its health, as vegetation height is associated with Above Ground Biomass (AGB) and can be used to track degradation or growth over time. Traditional methods to do this, however, rely on manual measurements of stem heights that can cause harm to the marsh ecosystem. Moreover, manual measurements are limited in scale and are often time and labor intensive. Unoccupied Aircraft Systems (UAS) can provide an alternative to manual measurements and generate continuous results across a large spatial extent in a short period of time. In this study, a multirotor UAS equipped with optical Red Green Blue (RGB) and multispectral sensors was used to survey five salt marshes in Beaufort, North Carolina. Structure-from-Motion (SfM) photogrammetry of the resultant imagery allowed for continuous modeling of the entire marsh ecosystem in a three-dimensional space. From these models, vegetation height was extracted and compared to ground-based manual measurements. Vegetation heights generated from UAS data consistently under-predicted true vegetation height proportionally and a transformation was developed to predict true vegetation height. Vegetation height may be used as a proxy for Above Ground Biomass (AGB) and contribute to blue carbon estimates, which describe the carbon sequestered in marine ecosystems. Employing this transformation, our results indicate that UAS and SfM are capable of producing accurate assessments of salt marsh health via consistent and accurate vegetation height measurements.

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Published In

Remote Sensing

DOI

EISSN

2072-4292

Publication Date

July 1, 2020

Volume

12

Issue

14

Related Subject Headings

  • 4013 Geomatic engineering
  • 3709 Physical geography and environmental geoscience
  • 3701 Atmospheric sciences
  • 0909 Geomatic Engineering
  • 0406 Physical Geography and Environmental Geoscience
  • 0203 Classical Physics
 

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DiGiacomo, A. E., Bird, C. N., Pan, V. G., Dobroski, K., Atkins-Davis, C., Johnston, D. W., & Ridge, J. T. (2020). Modeling salt marsh vegetation height using unoccupied aircraft systems and structure from motion. Remote Sensing, 12(14). https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12142333
DiGiacomo, A. E., C. N. Bird, V. G. Pan, K. Dobroski, C. Atkins-Davis, D. W. Johnston, and J. T. Ridge. “Modeling salt marsh vegetation height using unoccupied aircraft systems and structure from motion.” Remote Sensing 12, no. 14 (July 1, 2020). https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12142333.
DiGiacomo AE, Bird CN, Pan VG, Dobroski K, Atkins-Davis C, Johnston DW, et al. Modeling salt marsh vegetation height using unoccupied aircraft systems and structure from motion. Remote Sensing. 2020 Jul 1;12(14).
DiGiacomo, A. E., et al. “Modeling salt marsh vegetation height using unoccupied aircraft systems and structure from motion.” Remote Sensing, vol. 12, no. 14, July 2020. Scopus, doi:10.3390/rs12142333.
DiGiacomo AE, Bird CN, Pan VG, Dobroski K, Atkins-Davis C, Johnston DW, Ridge JT. Modeling salt marsh vegetation height using unoccupied aircraft systems and structure from motion. Remote Sensing. 2020 Jul 1;12(14).

Published In

Remote Sensing

DOI

EISSN

2072-4292

Publication Date

July 1, 2020

Volume

12

Issue

14

Related Subject Headings

  • 4013 Geomatic engineering
  • 3709 Physical geography and environmental geoscience
  • 3701 Atmospheric sciences
  • 0909 Geomatic Engineering
  • 0406 Physical Geography and Environmental Geoscience
  • 0203 Classical Physics