The Use of Very-High-Resolution Aerial Imagery to Estimate the Structure and Distribution of the Rhanterium epapposum Community for Long-Term Monitoring in Desert Ecosystems

Abstract

The rapid assessment and monitoring of native desert plants are essential in restoration and revegetation projects to track the changes in vegetation patterns in terms of vegetation coverage and structure. This work investigated advanced vegetation monitoring methods utilizing UAVs and remote sensing techniques at the Al Abdali protected site in Kuwait. The study examined the effectiveness of using UAV techniques to assess the structure of desert plants. We specifically examined the use of very-high-resolution aerial imagery to estimate the vegetation structure of Rhanterium epapposum (perennial desert shrub), assess the vegetation cover density changes in desert plants after rainfall events, and investigate the relationship between the distribution of perennial shrub structure and vegetation cover density of annual plants. The images were classified using supervised classification techniques (the SVM method) to assess the changes in desert plants after extreme rainfall events. A digital terrain model (DTM) and a digital surface model (DSM) were also generated to estimate the maximum shrub heights. The classified imagery results show that a significant increase in vegetation coverage occurred in the annual plants after rainfall events. The results also show a reasonable correlation between the shrub heights estimated using UAVs and the ground-truth measurements (R² = 0.66, p < 0.01). The shrub heights were higher in the high-cover-density plots, with coverage >30% and an average height of 77 cm. However, in the medium-cover-density (MD) plots, the coverage was <30%, and the average height was 52 cm. Our study suggests that utilizing UAVs can provide several advantages to critically support future ecological studies and revegetation and restoration programs in desert ecosystems.

Seedling Evaluation of Native Perennials for Implementing Large-scale Revegetation Projects in Arid Lands

“…Furthermore, it is important to assess and monitor the biodiversity changes occurring at the revegetation sites in order to follow the progress and study the vegetation succession rate. Monitoring methods have been employed lately in Kuwait using remote sensing techniques, GIS, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to capture and analyse highresolution imagery and monitor the progress level of each revegetation site (Abdullah et al, 2021a;Asadalla et al, 2021;Abdullah et al, 2022).…”

High-Resolution Mapping of Shrub Biomass in Arid and Semi-Arid Environments by Integrating Remote Sensing Observations across Multiple Spatial Scales

“…Equipped with highresolution sensors and advanced image processing techniques, UAVs can capture high-quality remote sensing imagery, offering comprehensive data on shrub vegetation [38,39]. They are capable of capturing extensive areas of shrub coverage from a high-altitude overhead perspective, enabling the rapid and accurate identification and extraction of shrub objects [37,[40][41][42]. Additionally, UAVs have higher spatial resolution and flexibility compared to traditional aerial remote sensing techniques, allowing for the capture of finer details of shrub structure and characteristics [43].…”