Abstract
Human migration and tourism in the Galapagos archipelago have rapidly increased since the 1980s. Accordingly, several Galapagos islands have experienced significant urban and agricultural development. Despite such dynamics, land cover map products currently available for the Galapagos Archipelago are limited in both spatial and temporal extents, mainly due to persistent cloud coverage for the area. This study characterizes approximately 20 years of land cover change on the Santa Cruz Island of the Galapagos archipelago through multi-sensor satellite data analyses using a rich Landsat archive as well as SPOT and Sentinel-2 imagery. To address the issue of satellite data availability in this cloud-prone region, this study examines two radiometric normalization and cloud gap-filling approaches on partially cloudy Landsat-7 SLC-off images. Compared to a commonly used Major Axis regression method, Random forest-based radiometric normalization shows superior performance in this complex tropical island setting, indicated by reduced differences of subject-reference image pairs and improved land cover mapping. Our land cover mapping focuses on characterizing urban and built-up, agriculture, and invasive plant species over time. Training data points are identified in the common ‘no-change’ areas for the years of 2000, 2009, and 2019, thus these data points could be used in all three image classification training processes. Overall accuracy for the 2019 land cover map (Landsat-8/Sentinel-2 derived) is 84% (Kappa = 0.81). For the study period, the total areas of invasive plant species substantially increased from 5.79 km2 to 19.16 km2. Distributions of urban and built-up and agriculture classes also slightly increased, suggesting an increased amount of direct human impacts on the island.
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Shao, Y., Wan, H., Rosenman, A., Laso, F.J., Kennedy, L.M. (2020). Evaluating Land Cover Change on the Island of Santa Cruz, Galapagos Archipelago of Ecuador Through Cloud-Gap Filling and Multi-sensor Analysis. In: Walsh, S.J., Riveros-Iregui, D., Arce-Nazario, J., Page, P.H. (eds) Land Cover and Land Use Change on Islands. Social and Ecological Interactions in the Galapagos Islands. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43973-6_7
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