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Use of bi-Seasonal Landsat-8 Imagery for Mapping Marshland Plant Community Combinations at the Regional Scale

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Abstract

Coastal marshlands may provide ecosystem services but their vegetation and related services may be impacted by environmental changes. Habitat mapping is a key step to monitor the spatio-temporal dynamics of vegetation and detect on-going changes. However, it is still a challenge to produce reliable vegetation maps at the regional scale. This study aims to evaluate the potential of new Landsat-8 imageries (acquired in September and December 2013) for mapping fine-grained plant communities in coastal marshlands. Field-based vegetation maps were collected for 270 km of marshlands along the French Atlantic coast. In order to be identifiable on the satellite image, fine-grained vegetation units were aggregated into fewer plant community combinations. The classification accuracy was assessed by comparison with field-based vegetation data and compared between the supervised methods used, including Minimum Distance, Mahalanobis, Maximum Likelihood, Random Forest and Support Vector Machine. The best result was obtained with the Maximum Likelihood classifier and by combining the two Landsat-8 images (85.9 % accuracy overall). Three main habitat types dominated the coastal Atlantic marshlands: croplands, Trifolio maritimae-Oenantheto silaifoliae geosigmetum and Puccinellio maritimae-Arthrocnemeto fruticosi geosigmetum. The reliability of the vegetation map produced will provide a good basis for monitoring the conservation status of the various habitats.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the CarHab project (French Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable Development). The authors thank Olivier Gore for his help in the field ; Nicolas Rossignol, Renan Leroux and Alban Thomas for their help in data analysis; the GIP Loire Estuaire, DREAL Pays de la Loire, DREAL Poitou Charentes, and the Parc Naturel Régional du Marais Poitevin for providing the field-based vegetation maps.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UMR 6553 CNRS ECOBIO, Université Rennes 1, avenue du général Leclerc, 35000, Rennes, France

    Sébastien Rapinel, Jan-Bernard Bouzillé & Anne Bonis

  2. UMR 6554 CNRS LETG, Université Rennes 2, place du recteur Henri Le Moal, 35000, Rennes, France

    Sébastien Rapinel & Johan Oszwald

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  1. Sébastien Rapinel
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  2. Jan-Bernard Bouzillé
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  3. Johan Oszwald
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  4. Anne Bonis
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Correspondence to Sébastien Rapinel.

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Rapinel, S., Bouzillé, JB., Oszwald, J. et al. Use of bi-Seasonal Landsat-8 Imagery for Mapping Marshland Plant Community Combinations at the Regional Scale. Wetlands 35, 1043–1054 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-015-0693-8

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