A multi-sensor approach for detecting the different land covers of tidal flats in the German Wadden Sea — A case study at Norderney

Comparison of two feature selection methods for the separability analysis of intertidal sediments with spectrometric datasets in the German Wadden Sea

“…This shows the ineffectiveness of the RapidEye sensor for mapping intertidal sediments, which was already revealed in Jung et al (2015). Spectral bands between 550 nm-650 nm, at 674 nm and at 970 nm would enhance the discrimination capability of multispectral sensors.…”

“…A previous study of Jung et al (2015) demonstrated the difficulties of discriminating intertidal sediments with the multispectral satellite data of RapidEye. Therefore, the aim of this study was to estimate wavelengths that enable the separability of intertidal sediments of the German North Sea by proposing a new approach called Jeffries-Matusita distance based feature selection (JMDFS).…”

“…The study area 'Norderney' is part of the German National Park Lower Saxony Wadden Sea, in the south-western part of the German North Sea, south of the barrier island 'Norderney' with a size of approximately 50 km 2 . Jung et al (2015) give a detailed description of the study area. Fig.…”

“…Tidal flats are spatially complex and temporally quite variable and thus mapping tidal land cover requires satellites or aircraft imagers with high spatial and temporal resolution and, in some cases, hyperspectral data. Jung et al (2015) showed the difficulties of classifying sediments of the tidal flats by applying only multispectral data (RapidEye). They state that the spectral resolution and the band positions of RapidEye were not sufficient enough for the separation of the sediments, especially sand and mud.…”

“…This could be shown by a previous study of Jung et al (2015). A more detailed analysis of their characteristic spectral feature has to be carried out to understand the differences and similarities.…”