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1. Grass Evolutionary Lineages Can Be Identified Using Hyperspectral Leaf Reflectance

   https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JG007852  

   Slapikas, Ryan; Pau, Stephanie; Donnelly, Ryan C.; Ho, Che‐Ling; Nippert, Jesse B.; Helliker, Brent R.; Riley, William J.; Still, Christopher J.; Griffith, Daniel M. (February 2024, Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences)

   Abstract Hyperspectral remote sensing has the potential to map numerous attributes of the Earth’s surface, including spatial patterns of biological diversity. Grasslands are one of the largest biomes on Earth. Accurate mapping of grassland biodiversity relies on spectral discrimination of endmembers of species or plant functional types. We focused on spectral separation of grass lineages that dominate global grassy biomes: Andropogoneae (C₄), Chloridoideae (C₄), and Pooideae (C₃). We examined leaf reflectance spectra (350–2,500 nm) from 43 grass species representing these grass lineages from four representative grassland sites in the Great Plains region of North America. We assessed the utility of leaf reflectance data for classification of grass species into three major lineages and by collection site. Classifications had very high accuracy (94%) that were robust to site differences in species and environment. We also show an information loss using multispectral sensors, that is, classification accuracy of grass lineages using spectral bands provided by current multispectral satellites is much lower (accuracy of 85.2% and 61.3% using Sentinel 2 and Landsat 8 bands, respectively). Our results suggest that hyperspectral data have an exciting potential for mapping grass functional types as informed by phylogeny. Leaf‐level hyperspectral separability of grass lineages is consistent with the potential increase in biodiversity and functional information content from the next generation of satellite‐based spectrometers. 

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2. Multisensor UAS mapping of Plant Species and Plant Functional Types in Midwestern Grasslands

   https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14143453  

   Hall, Emma C.; Lara, Mark J. (July 2022, Remote Sensing)

   Uncrewed aerial systems (UASs) have emerged as powerful ecological observation platforms capable of filling critical spatial and spectral observation gaps in plant physiological and phenological traits that have been difficult to measure from space-borne sensors. Despite recent technological advances, the high cost of drone-borne sensors limits the widespread application of UAS technology across scientific disciplines. Here, we evaluate the tradeoffs between off-the-shelf and sophisticated drone-borne sensors for mapping plant species and plant functional types (PFTs) within a diverse grassland. Specifically, we compared species and PFT mapping accuracies derived from hyperspectral, multispectral, and RGB imagery fused with light detection and ranging (LiDAR) or structure-for-motion (SfM)-derived canopy height models (CHM). Sensor–data fusion were used to consider either a single observation period or near-monthly observation frequencies for integration of phenological information (i.e., phenometrics). Results indicate that overall classification accuracies for plant species and PFTs were highest in hyperspectral and LiDAR-CHM fusions (78 and 89%, respectively), followed by multispectral and phenometric–SfM–CHM fusions (52 and 60%, respectively) and RGB and SfM–CHM fusions (45 and 47%, respectively). Our findings demonstrate clear tradeoffs in mapping accuracies from economical versus exorbitant sensor networks but highlight that off-the-shelf multispectral sensors may achieve accuracies comparable to those of sophisticated UAS sensors by integrating phenometrics into machine learning image classifiers. 

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3. Using Object-Oriented Classification for Coastal Management in the East Central Coast of Florida: A Quantitative Comparison between UAV, Satellite, and Aerial Data

   https://doi.org/10.3390/drones3030060  

   Yang, Bo; Hawthorne, Timothy L.; Torres, Hannah; Feinman, Michael (September 2019, Drones)

   High resolution mapping of coastal habitats is invaluable for resource inventory, change detection, and inventory of aquaculture applications. However, coastal areas, especially the interior of mangroves, are often difficult to access. An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), equipped with a multispectral sensor, affords an opportunity to improve upon satellite imagery for coastal management because of the very high spatial resolution, multispectral capability, and opportunity to collect real-time observations. Despite the recent and rapid development of UAV mapping applications, few articles have quantitatively compared how much improvement there is of UAV multispectral mapping methods compared to more conventional remote sensing data such as satellite imagery. The objective of this paper is to quantitatively demonstrate the improvements of a multispectral UAV mapping technique for higher resolution images used for advanced mapping and assessing coastal land cover. We performed multispectral UAV mapping fieldwork trials over Indian River Lagoon along the central Atlantic coast of Florida. Ground Control Points (GCPs) were collected to generate a rigorous geo-referenced dataset of UAV imagery and support comparison to geo-referenced satellite and aerial imagery. Multi-spectral satellite imagery (Sentinel-2) was also acquired to map land cover for the same region. NDVI and object-oriented classification methods were used for comparison between UAV and satellite mapping capabilities. Compared with aerial images acquired from Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the UAV multi-spectral mapping method used in this study provided advanced information of the physical conditions of the study area, an improved land feature delineation, and a significantly better mapping product than satellite imagery with coarser resolution. The study demonstrates a replicable UAV multi-spectral mapping method useful for study sites that lack high quality data. 

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4. Predicting Urban Trees’ Functional Trait Responses to Heat Using Reflectance Spectroscopy

   https://doi.org/10.3390/rs16132291  

   Kyaw, Thu Ya; Alonzo, Michael; Baker, Matthew E; Eisenman, Sasha W; Caplan, Joshua S (July 2024, Remote Sensing)

   Plant traits are often measured in the field or laboratory to characterize stress responses. However, direct measurements are not always cost effective for broader sampling efforts, whereas indirect approaches such as reflectance spectroscopy could offer efficient and scalable alternatives. Here, we used field spectroscopy to assess whether (1) existing vegetation indices could predict leaf trait responses to heat stress, or if (2) partial least squares regression (PLSR) spectral models could quantify these trait responses. On several warm, sunny days, we measured leaf trait responses indicative of photosynthetic mechanisms, plant water status, and morphology, including electron transport rate (ETR), photochemical quenching (qP), leaf water potential (Ψleaf), and specific leaf area (SLA) in 51 urban trees from nine species. Concurrent measures of hyperspectral leaf reflectance from the same individuals were used to calculate vegetation indices for correlation with trait responses. We found that vegetation indices predicted only SLA robustly (R2 = 0.55), while PLSR predicted all leaf trait responses of interest with modest success (R2 = 0.36 to 0.58). Using spectral band subsets corresponding to commercially available drone-mounted hyperspectral cameras, as well as those selected for use in common multispectral satellite missions, we were able to estimate ETR, qP, and SLA with reasonable accuracy, highlighting the potential for large-scale prediction of these parameters. Overall, reflectance spectroscopy and PLSR can identify wavelengths and wavelength ranges that are important for remote sensing-based modeling of important functional trait responses of trees to heat stress over broad ranges. 

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5. A Pixel Level Scaled Fusion Model to Provide High Spatial-Spectral Resolution for Satellite Images Using LSTM Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1109/WHISPERS.2019.8921269  

   Theran, Carlos A.; Alvarez, Michael A.; Arzuaga, Emmanuel; Sierra, Heidy (December 2019, 2019 10th Workshop on Hyperspectral Imaging and Signal Processing: Evolution in Remote Sensing (WHISPERS))

   Pixel-level fusion of satellite images coming from multiple sensors allows for an improvement in the quality of the acquired data both spatially and spectrally. In particular, multispectral and hyperspectral images have been fused to generate images with a high spatial and spectral resolution. In literature, there are several approaches for this task, nonetheless, those techniques still present a loss of relevant spatial information during the fusion process. This work presents a multi scale deep learning model to fuse multispectral and hyperspectral data, each with high-spatial-and-low-spectral resolution (HSaLS) and low-spatial-and-high-spectral resolution (LSaHS) respectively. As a result of the fusion scheme, a high-spatial-and-spectral resolution image (HSaHS) can be obtained. In order of accomplishing this result, we have developed a new scalable high spatial resolution process in which the model learns how to transition from low spatial resolution to an intermediate spatial resolution level and finally to the high spatial-spectral resolution image. This step-by-step process reduces significantly the loss of spatial information. The results of our approach show better performance in terms of both the structural similarity index and the signal to noise ratio. 

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