Wetlands are an important natural resource that requires monitoring. A key step in environmental monitoring is to map the locations and characteristics of the resource to better enable assessment of change over time. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems are helpful in this way for wetland resources because their data can be used to map and monitor changes in surface water extent, saturated soils, flooded vegetation, and changes in wetland vegetation cover. We review a few techniques to demonstrate SAR capabilities for wetland monitoring, including the commonly used method of grey-level thresholding for mapping surface water and highlighting changes in extent, and approaches for polarimetric decompositions to map flooded vegetation and changes from one class of land cover to another. We use the Curvelet-based change detection and the Wishart-Chernoff Distance approaches to show how they substantially improve mapping of flooded vegetation and flagging areas of change, respectively. We recommend that the increasing availability SAR data and the proven ability of these data to map various components of wetlands mean SAR should be considered as a critical component of a wetland monitoring system.

Due to spatial and temporal variability an effective monitoring system for water resources must consider the use of remote sensing to provide information. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is useful due to timely data acquisition and sensitivity to surface water and flooded vegetation. The ability to map flooded vegetation is attributed to the double bounce scattering mechanism, often dominant for this target. Dong Ting Lake in China is an ideal site for evaluating SAR data for this application due to annual flooding caused by mountain snow melt causing extensive changes in flooded vegetation. A curvelet-based approach for change detection in SAR imagery works well as it highlights the change and suppresses the speckle noise. This paper addresses the extension of this change detection technique to polarimetric SAR data for monitoring surface water and flooded vegetation. RADARSAT-2 images of Dong Ting Lake demonstrate this curvelet-based change detection technique applied to wetlands although it is applicable to other land covers and for post disaster impact assessment. These tools are important to Digital Earth for map updating and revision.

As the number of space-borne SAR sensors increases, a rising number of different SAR acquisition modes is in use, resulting in a higher variation within the image products. This variability in acquisition geometry, radiometry, and last but not least polarimetry raises the need for a consistent SAR image description incorporating all available sensors and acquisition modes. This paper therefore introduces the framework of the Kennaugh elements to comparably represent all kinds of multi-scale, multi-temporal, multi-polarized, multi-frequency, and hence, multi-sensor data in a consistent mathematical framework. Furthermore, a novel noise model is introduced that estimates the significance and thus the (polarimetric) information content of the Kennaugh elements. This facilitates an advanced filtering approach, called multi-scale multi-looking, which is shown to improve the radiometric accuracy while preserving the geometric resolution of SAR images. The proposed methodology is finally demonstrated using sample applications that include TerraSAR-X (X-band), Envisat-ASAR, RADARSAT-2 (C-band) and ALOS-PALSAR (L-band) data as well as the combination of all three frequencies. Thus the suitability of the Kennaugh element framework for practical use in proved for advanced SAR remote sensing

One fundamental task in wetland monitoring is the regular mapping of (temporarily) flooded areas especially beneath vegetation. Due to the independence of weather and illumination conditions, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors could provide a suitable data base. Using polarimetric modes enables the identification of flooded vegetation by means of the typical double-bounce scattering. In this paper three decomposition techniques—Cloude-Pottier, Freeman-Durden, and Normalized Kennaugh elements—are compared to each other in terms of identifying the flooding extent as well as its temporal change. The image comparison along the time series is performed with the help of the Curvelet-based Change Detection Method. The results indicate that the decomposition algorithm has a strong impact on the robustness and reliability of the change detection. The Normalized Kennaugh elements turn out to be the optimal representation for Curvelet-based change detection processing. Furthermore, the co-polarized channels (same transmit and receive polarization in horizontal (HH) and vertical (VV) direction respectively) appear to be sufficient for wetland monitoring so that dual-co-polarized imaging modes could be an alternative to conventional quad-polarized acquisitions.

With climate change, extreme storms are expected to occur more frequently. These storms can cause severe forest damage, provoking direct and indirect economic losses for forestry. To minimize economic losses, the windthrow areas need to be detected fast to prevent subsequent biotic damage, for example, related to beetle infestations. Remote sensing is an efficient tool with high potential to cost-efficiently map large storm affected regions. Storm Niklas hit South Germany in March 2015 and caused widespread forest cover loss. We present a two-step change detection approach applying commercial very high-resolution optical Earth Observation data to spot forest damage. First, an object-based bi-temporal change analysis is carried out to identify windthrow areas larger than 0.5 ha. For this purpose, a supervised Random Forest classifier is used, including a semi-automatic feature selection procedure; for image segmentation, the large-scale mean shift algorithm was chosen. Input features include spectral characteristics, texture, vegetation indices, layer combinations and spectral transformations. A hybrid-change detection approach at pixel-level subsequently identifies small groups of fallen trees, combining the most important features of the previous processing step with Spectral Angle Mapper and Multivariate Alteration Detection. The methodology was evaluated on two test sites in Bavaria with RapidEye data at 5 m pixel resolution. The results regarding windthrow areas larger than 0.5 ha were validated with reference data from field visits and acquired through orthophoto interpretation. For the two test sites, the novel object-based change detection approach identified over 90% of the windthrow areas (≥0.5 ha). The red edge channel was the most important for windthrow identification. Accuracy levels of the change detection at tree level could not be calculated, as it was not possible to collect field data for single trees, nor was it possible to perform an orthophoto validation. Nevertheless, the plausibility and applicability of the pixel-based approach is demonstrated on a second test site.