Plant diseases are one of the main reasons behind major economic and production losses in the agricultural field. Current research activities enable large fields monitoring and plant disease detection using innovative and robust technologies. French grapevines have a reputation for producing premium quality wines, however, these major fruit crops are susceptible to many diseases, including Esca, Downy mildew, Powdery mildew, Yellowing, and many others. In this study, we focused on two main infections (Esca and Yellowing), and data were gathered from fields that were located in Aquitaine and Burgundy regions, France. Since plant diseases can be diagnosed from the properties of the leaf, we acquired both Red-Green-Blue (RGB) digital image and hyperspectral reflectance data from infected and healthy leaves. Biophysical parameters that were produced by the PROSPECT model inversion together with texture parameters compiled from the literature were deduced. Then we investigated their relationship to damage caused by Yellowing and Esca. This study examined whether spectral and textural data can identify the two diseases through the use of Neural Networks. We obtained an overall accuracy of 99% for both of the diseases when textural and spectral data are combined. These results suggest that, first, biophysical parameters present a valid dimension reduction tool that could replace the use of complete hyperspectral data. Second, remote sensing using spectral reflectance and digital images can make an overall nondestructive, rapid, cost-effective, and reproducible technique to determine diseases in grapevines with a good level of accuracy.

Automatic tree crown segmentation from remote sensing data is especially challenging in dense, diverse, and multilayered tropical forest canopies, and tracking mortality by this approach is even more difficult. Here, we examine the potential for combining airborne laser scanning (ALS) with multispectral and hyperspectral data to improve the accuracy of tree crown segmentation at a study site in French Guiana. We combined an ALS point cloud clustering method with a spectral deep learning model to achieve 83% accuracy at recognizing manually segmented reference crowns (with congruence >0.5). This method outperformed a two-step process that involved clustering the ALS point cloud and then using the logistic regression of hyperspectral distances to correct oversegmentation. We used this approach to map tree mortality from repeat surveys and show that the number of crowns identified in the first that intersected with height loss clusters was a good estimator of the number of dead trees in these areas. Our results demonstrate that multisensor data fusion improves the automatic segmentation of individual tree crowns and presents a promising avenue to study forest demography with repeated remote sensing acquisitions.

Imaging spectroscopy is a promising tool for airborne tree species recognition in hyper-diverse tropical canopies. However, its widespread application is limited by the signal sensitivity to acquisition parameters, which may require new training data in every new area of application. This study explores how various pre-processing steps may improve species discrimination and species recognition under different operational settings. In the first experiment, a classifier was trained and applied on imaging spectroscopy data acquired on a single date, while in a second experiment, the classifier was trained on data from one date and applied to species identification on data from a different date. A radiative transfer model based on atmospheric compensation was applied with special focus on the automatic retrieval of aerosol amounts. The impact of spatial or spectral filtering and normalisation was explored as an alternative to atmospheric correction. A pixel-wise classification was performed with a linear discriminant analysis trained on individual tree crowns identified at the species level. Tree species were then identified at the crown scale based on a majority vote rule. Atmospheric corrections did not outperform simple statistical processing (i.e., filtering and normalisation) when training and testing sets were taken from the same flight date. However, atmospheric corrections became necessary for reliable species recognition when different dates were considered. Shadow masking improved species classification results in all cases. Single date classification rate was 83.9% for 1297 crowns of 20 tropical species. The loss of mean accuracy observed when using training data from one date to identify species at another date in the same area was limited to 10% when atmospheric correction was applied.

Classifiers trained on airborne hyperspectral imagery are proficient in identifying tree species in hyperdiverse tropical rainforests. However, spectral fluctuations, influenced by intrinsic and environmental factors, such as the heterogeneity of individual crown properties and atmospheric conditions, pose challenges for large-scale mapping. This study proposes an approach to assess the instability of airborne imaging spectroscopy reflectance in response to environmental variability. Through repeated overflights of two tropical forest sites in French Guiana, we explore factors that affect the spectral similarity between dates and acquisitions. By decomposing acquisitions into subsets and analyzing different sources of variability, we analyze the stability of reflectance and various vegetation indices with respect to specific sources of variability. Factors such as the variability of the viewing and sun angles or the variability of the atmospheric state shed light on the impact of sources of spectral instability, informing processing strategies. Our experiments conclude that the environmental factors that affect the canopy reflectance the most vary according to the considered spectral domain. In the Short Wave Infra-Red (SWIR) domain, solar angle variation is the main source of variability, followed by atmospheric and viewing angles. In the Visible and Near Infra-Red (VNIR) domain, atmospheric variability dominates, followed by solar angle and viewing angle variabilities. Despite efforts to address these variabilities, significant spectral instability persists, highlighting the need for more robust representations and improved correction methods for reliable species-specific signatures.

Summary: Airborne imaging spectroscopy can identify tree species in hyperdiverse tropical forests, but accuracy varies greatly among species. We asked which ecological and evolutionary attributes make a tropical tree species spectrally separable. In moist tropical forest in French Guiana, we fitted the learning curve of accuracy against the number of labelled crowns for 169 species, then tested six hypothesised determinants on 45 species rarefied to ten crowns, at species, species-pair and crown scales. Dispersed sampling and larger crowns increased accuracy, and liana infestation more than halved the odds of correct identification. Phenological regularity, how closely conspecific crowns share one leaf cycle, in step or not, was the strongest species-level correlate and survived every multivariate analysis. It did not act by making conspecifics uniform on the acquisition date: regular species were spectrally more distinct from other species, and within species the crowns that best followed the species’ leaf cycle were classified correctly. Congeners reduced accuracy; leaf and bark traits did not predict separability. Separability depends on the consistency of a species’ signal, how faithfully its crowns express a shared leaf cycle, how widely it is sampled and how free its crowns are from contamination, rather than on its measured functional traits.