Precisely estimating the yield of paddy rice is crucial for national food security and development evaluation. Rice yield estimation based on satellite imagery is usually performed with global regression models; however, estimation errors may occur because the spatial variation is not considered. Therefore, this study proposed an approach estimating paddy rice yield based on global and local regression models. In our study area, the overall per-field data might not available because it took lots of time and manpower as well as resources. Therefore, we gathered and accumulated 26 to 63 ground survey sample fields, accounting for about 0.05% of the total cultivated areas, as the training samples for our regression models. To demonstrate whether the spatial autocorrelation or spatial heterogeneity exists and dominates the estimation, global models including the ordinary least squares (OLS), support vector regression (SVR), and the local model geographically weighted regression (GWR) were used to build the yield estimation models. We obtained the representative independent variables, including 4 original bands, 11 vegetation indices, and 32 texture indices, from SPOT-7 multispectral satellite imagery. To determine the optimal variable combination, feature selection based on the Pearson correlation was used for all of the regression models. The case study in Central Taiwan rendered that the error rate was between 0.06% and 13.22%. Through feature selection, the GWR model’s performance was more relatively stable than the OLS model and nonlinear SVR model for yield estimation. Where the GWR model considers the spatial autocorrelation and spatial heterogeneity of the relationships between the yield and the independent variables, the OLS and nonlinear SVR models lack this feature; this led to the rice yield estimation of GWR in this study be more stable than those of the other two models.

Development in mountainous areas is inevitable in countries with high population densities, but the actual relationship between development and landslides remains uncertain. Clarifying the key current or historical factors resulting in landslides is crucial for hazard prevention and mitigation. This study focused on the Shihmen Reservoir catchment in Taiwan. Two combinations of explanatory variables in five different years (1946, 1971, 2001, 2004, and 2012) collected from a geodatabase and digital archives were used to conduct proximity and discrete logistic regression analyses. The results demonstrate that landslides increased dramatically from 1946 to 2012 in the catchment area. The proximity and overlapping of human development with landslides increased. However, the logistic regression results indicated that variation in susceptibility to landslides was due to natural causes, with the exception of historical deforestation and newly constructed road systems. Therefore, well-recovered historical woodland sites might currently be landslide-prone areas. We suggest that cumulative historical events should be considered as explanatory variables in future landslide prediction analysis.

Tea is an important but vulnerable economic crop in East Asia, highly impacted by climate change. This study attempts to interpret tea land use/land cover (LULC) using very high resolution WorldView-2 imagery of central Taiwan with both pixel and object-based approaches. A total of 80 variables derived from each WorldView-2 band with pan-sharpening, standardization, principal components and gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) texture indices transformation, were set as the input variables. For pixel-based image analysis (PBIA), 34 variables were selected, including seven principal components, 21 GLCM texture indices and six original WorldView-2 bands. Results showed that support vector machine (SVM) had the highest tea crop classification accuracy (OA = 84.70% and KIA = 0.690), followed by random forest (RF), maximum likelihood algorithm (ML), and logistic regression analysis (LR). However, the ML classifier achieved the highest classification accuracy (OA = 96.04% and KIA = 0.887) in object-based image analysis (OBIA) using only six variables. The contribution of this study is to create a new framework for accurately identifying tea crops in a subtropical region with real-time high-resolution WorldView-2 imagery without field survey, which could further aid agriculture land management and a sustainable agricultural product supply.

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