Affordable Use of Satellite Imagery in Agriculture and Development Projects: Assessing the Spatial Distribution of Invasive Weeds in the UNESCO-Protected Areas of Cuba
The effective and regular remote monitoring of agricultural activity is not always possible in developing countries because the access to cloud-based geospatial analysis platforms or expensive high-resolution satellite images are not always available. Herein, using paid high-resolution satellite ima...
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| Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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| Formato: | article |
| Lenguaje: | EN |
| Publicado: |
MDPI AG
2021
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | https://doaj.org/article/82bbaa0b421849f49a6efc69a222d9fe |
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| Sumario: | The effective and regular remote monitoring of agricultural activity is not always possible in developing countries because the access to cloud-based geospatial analysis platforms or expensive high-resolution satellite images are not always available. Herein, using paid high-resolution satellite images first and then free medium-resolution satellite images, we aimed to develop a cost-free, affordable method for regularly mapping the spatial distribution of sicklebush (<i>Dichrostachys cinerea</i>), an archetypal allochthonous invasive plant in Cuba that is becoming impossible to control owing to its rapid growth in areas planted with sugar cane in the Trinidad-Valle de los Ingenios area (Cuba), a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Two types of images were used (WorldView-2 and Landsat-8); these were subjected to supervised classification, with accuracy values of 88.7% and 93.7%, respectively. Vegetation cover was first derived from the purchased WorldView-2 image, and this information was then used as the training field to obtain spectral signatures from the Landsat-8 free image so that Landsat images may be regularly used to monitor <i>D. cinerea</i> infestations. The results obtained in the spatial distribution map for sicklebush in the Landsat-8 images had an overall reliability of 93.7% and a Kappa coefficient reliability of 91.9%. These values indicate high confidence in the results, which suggests that sicklebush has invaded 52.7% of the total 46,807.26-ha area of the Trinidad-Valle de los Ingenios. This process proved extremely effective and demonstrated the benefits of using high-resolution spatial images from which information can be transferred to free satellite images with a larger pixel size. |
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