Michael Hughes

Prof. Dr. Michael Hughes

NSW Office of Environment & Heritage, University of Sydney, Lidcombe, Australia
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Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

38Years (1989-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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1 August 2010 in Renewable Energy
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Michael HughesMichael Hughes
Michael Hughes
AHAndrew D. Heap
Andrew D. Heap

1 August 1998 in Continental Shelf Research
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
GMGerd Masselink
Gerd Masselink
Michael HughesMichael Hughes
Michael Hughes

1 March 2004 in Coastal Engineering
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
TBTom Baldock
Tom Baldock
MTM.R. Tomkins
M.R. Tomkins
PNP. Nielsen
P. Nielsen
Michael HughesMichael Hughes
Michael Hughes

1 April 1997 in Marine Geology
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Michael HughesMichael Hughes
Michael Hughes
GMGerd Masselink
Gerd Masselink
RBRobert W. Brander
Robert W. Brander

25 May 2020 in Remote Sensing
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
Li WenLi Wen
Li Wen
Michael HughesMichael Hughes
Michael Hughes
Coastal wetlands are a critical component of the coastal landscape that are increasingly threatened by sea level rise and other human disturbance. Periodically mapping wetland distribution is crucial to coastal ecosystem management. Ensemble algorithms (EL), such as random forest (RF) and gradient boosting machine (GBM) algorithms, are now commonly applied in the field of remote sensing. However, the performance and potential of other EL methods, such as extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) and bagged trees, are rarely compared and tested for coastal wetland mapping. In this study, we applied the three most widely used EL techniques (i.e., bagging, boosting and stacking) to map wetland distribution in a highly modified coastal catchment, the Manning River Estuary, Australia. Our results demonstrated the advantages of using ensemble classifiers to accurately map wetland types in a coastal landscape. Enhanced bagging decision trees, i.e., classifiers with additional methods to increasing ensemble diversity such as RF and weighted subspace random forest, had comparably high predictive power. For the stacking method evaluated in this study, our results are inconclusive, and further comprehensive quantitative study is encouraged. Our findings also suggested that the ensemble methods were less effective at discriminating minority classes in comparison with more common classes. Finally, the variable importance results indicated that hydro-geomorphic factors, such as tidal depth and distance to water edge, were among the most influential variables across the top classifiers. However, vegetation indices derived from longer time series of remote sensing data that arrest the full features of land phenology are likely to improve wetland type separation in coastal areas.

1 April 2005 in Marine Geology
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
GMGerd Masselink
Gerd Masselink
DEDarren Evans
Darren Evans
Michael HughesMichael Hughes
Michael Hughes
PRPaul Russell
Paul Russell