Object-based classification of urban plant species from very high-resolution satellite imagery

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2023.127866Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Full inventory is needed to quantify the benefits provided by urban vegetation

  • Suitability of very-high resolution satellite imagery to detect plant species in cities.

  • Object-based classification applied for identifying tree species and grassland.

  • Most of urban plants (>85%) grow in private areas.

  • In both cities, 22 and 20 plant species are identified with an accuracy of 84% and 83%.

Abstract

Cities are facing too many challenges. Urban vegetation, in particular trees, are essential as they provide services in terms of air pollution mitigation, freshness, biodiversity, and citizens’ well-being. Accurate data on location, species, and structural characteristics are essential for quantifying their benefits. However, the cost of measuring thousands of individual trees through field campaigns can be prohibitive and reliable information on domestic gardens is lacking due to difficulties in acquiring systematic data. The main objective of this study was to investigate the suitability of very-high resolution satellite imagery, e.g., WorldView-2, for detecting, delineating, and classifying the urban plant species in both public and private areas. The characterization of urban vegetation is difficult due to the complexity of the urban environment (buildings, shadows, open courtyards), the diversity of species and the spatial proximity between trees. To overcome these constraints, an object-based classification was developed with the selection of new relevant spectral and texture-based features for each plant species. Four spectral bands (blue, green, yellow, red) and four texture features (i.e., energy, entropy, inverse difference moment, Haralick correlation) were found to be the most efficient attributes for object-based classification from WV-2 images. Then, a classification of plant species, by using a Random Forest classifier, and ground validation were performed. In the two study areas, Aix-en-Provence (France) and Florence (Italy), 22 and 20 dominant plant species, and grassland, were identified and classified with an overall accuracy of 84% and 83%, respectively. The highest classification accuracy was obtained for Pinus spp. and Platanus acerifolia in Aix-en-Provence, and for Celtis australis and Cupressus sempervirens in Florence. The lowest classification accuracy was obtained for Quercus spp. in Aix-en-Provence, and Magnolia grandiflora in Florence.

Introduction

Global warming and air pollution are two major concerns affecting biodiversity, life quality, citizens well-being and human health (Anenberg et al., 2022, Malashock et al., 2022, Sicard et al., 2023, Southerland et al., 2022), in particular in cities where 56% of the world population lived in 2020 (United Nations, 2020). Following successive heatwaves and the COVID-19 pandemic, the European cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants have to establish “ambitious Urban Greening Plans” by including nature-based solutions and greening strategies by 2030 (European Union Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, COM (2020)380 final) to both mitigate the effects of air pollution and climate change and adapt to them. Urban trees are the most important elements of urban ecosystems (Ostberg et al., 2018), and contribute to reduce air pollution in cities (Baró et al., 2015, Salbitano et al., 2016, Nowak et al., 2018, Sicard et al., 2018, Pace et al., 2021), increase carbon stock (Proietti et al., 2016), mitigate the urban heat islands (Manes et al., 2012, Ren et al., 2022), provide cooling and shading (Rahman et al., 2020), regulate water runoff (Pataki et al., 2011), reduce noise (Klingberg et al., 2017) as well as provide social and psychological benefits, enhancing citizens’ well-being and human health (Samson et al., 2019, Ugolini et al., 2020).

Information about the individual tree, accurate data on location, species, and structural characteristic such as tree height and crown diameter are essential to quantify the environmental and social benefits of urban trees (e.g., Manes et al., 2016; Russo et al., 2016; Fusaro et al., 2017; Pace et al., 2018; Pu and Landry, 2019). Most of these data are derived from municipal tree inventories (e.g., Selmi et al., 2016), which include only public trees managed by the municipality representing e.g., about 36% of full stocking in 50 cities in the United States (McPherson et al., 2016). Tree inventories can also be obtained from field visits by visual observations (Nowak et al., 2013, Persson, 2016). This method is often expensive and time-consuming (Klingberg et al., 2017), and inefficient at larger scales when the tree species distribution is heterogeneous (Nowak et al., 2008, Westfall, 2015, Persson, 2016), making remote sensing more attractive (Klingberg et al., 2017).

Shojanoori and Shafri (2016) performed an extensive literature review on the use of remote sensing for forestry applications, particularly for tree species detection. During the last decades, the use of aerial photography and airborne laser scanning, such as LiDAR data, was widely used and considered as the most accurate remote sensing technique to estimate forest attributes (e.g., Singh et al., 2015; Alonzo et al., 2016; Persson, 2016; Song et al., 2016; Chen et al., 2017; Solano et al., 2019). The high cost coupled with the spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution of such techniques are the main limiting factors to using LiDAR to investigate individual trees (Key et al., 2001, Shojanoori and Shafri, 2016). In most of the previous studies, tree attributes were derived from satellite imagery at moderate spatial resolution such as Landsat (Manes et al., 2012, Silli et al., 2015, Marando et al., 2016) and sensors like Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (Manes et al., 2016, Bottalico et al., 2017). Remote sensing, with high spatial and spectral resolution, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) could be cost-effective and consistent techniques to get information about individual trees (Larondelle et al., 2014, Alonzo et al., 2016, Parmehr et al., 2016, Fusaro et al., 2017), when employed with useful tools in Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystem Services (Maes et al., 2016).

Since 2000, the spatial resolution of the optical very high resolution (VHR) satellite sensors allows detecting and estimating some tree attributes at landscape scale (Table 1S), e.g., Geoeye-1 (Qian et al., 2020), IKONOS (Pu and Landry, 2012), WorldView (Immitzer et al., 2012, Pope and Treitz, 2013, Nouri et al., 2014, Li et al., 2015, Pu et al., 2015, Choudhury et al., 2019, Kokubu et al., 2020), and Pléiades (Beguet et al., 2014, Lefebvre et al., 2016, Akbari and Kalbi, 2016, Effiom, 2018, Pu and Landry, 2019) at a lower cost compared to field observations or airborne laser scanning (Persson, 2016). Compared to IKONOS, the WV-2 sensor has a greater capability to classify tree species (Pu and Landry, 2012), and the Pléiades and WV-2 images perform equally well for estimation of forest attributes (Persson, 2016). Such steerable optical sensors allow fast and frequent stereo or tri-stereo acquisitions of cloud-free images over larger areas within a short interval of time (Persson, 2016).

Most of the previous studies, using very high spatial resolution satellite imagery, were limited to rural and forested areas (e.g., Immitzer et al., 2012; Pu and Cheng, 2015; Akbari and Kalbi, 2016; Modica et al., 2016; Solano et al., 2019). The detection of individual trees and species differentiation are challenging in cities, as trees can be isolated, lined up or grouped in patch, with a wide range of plant species, high spectral similarity of vegetation types, and high-density stands, trees in the shade, trees with low spectral contrast, and proximity of neighboring buildings (Alonzo et al., 2015, Parmehr et al., 2016, Klingberg et al., 2017, Choudhury et al., 2019). In addition, private gardens are an important component of urban landscape and urban green infrastructure, for instance contributing to 35-47% of the total urban green spaces in the United Kingdom (Loram et al., 2007). The potential contribution of residential areas and yards to overall urban sustainability is recognized worldwide (Owen, 2010, Cameron et al., 2012, Vila-Ruiz et al., 2014, Zhang and Jim, 2014), and could make significant contributions to urban biodiversity and ecological richness in cities (Smith et al., 2006, Müller et al., 2010, Cameron et al., 2012). However, their relative value within the wider urban green space is difficult to quantify and hence their measurable benefits is rarely assessed (Cameron et al., 2012, Zhang and Jim, 2014).

For a realistic and proper quantification of the benefits of urban vegetation in terms of providing ecosystem services such as mitigation of air pollution and urban heat island, and above-ground carbon storage at city scale, a consistent inventory of vegetation within private and public areas, is needed to avoid a large underestimation and to establish an efficient Urban Greening Plan and carbon footprint (Sicard et al., 2018, Pretzsch et al., 2021). As tree species diversity is a major factor in providing ecosystem services in cities (Grote et al., 2016, Galle et al., 2021), the large variety of tree species cannot be classified as a single vegetation category (e.g., conifers, broadleaves, and mixed species) as previously performed in studies (e.g., Manes et al., 2016; Bottalico et al., 2017).

For individual tree classification in urban areas, previous studies have reported that the classification algorithm produced better results by using object-based (overall accuracy: 77%) than pixel-based approach (overall accuracy: 73%) due to high spectral variability (Pu et al., 2011). By using pixel-based classification, the spectral response of individual trees can be influenced by canopy exposition (sunlit/shaded) and shaded canopy due to nearby buildings, reducing the overall accuracy (Quackenbush et al., 2000). The object-based image analysis includes spectral, textural, and spatial features, suitable for individual tree species classification in urban environments (Choudhury et al., 2020, Lefebvre et al., 2016, Puissant et al., 2014, Shojanoori and Shafri, 2016, Zhang and Qiu, 2012, Zhou, 2013). In literature, the object-based classification was performed using two machine learning approaches: Random Forest (e.g., Boukir et al., 2015, Puissant et al., 2014; Huesca et al., 2019, Immitzer et al., 2016, Lefebvre et al., 2016) and Support Vector Machine (e.g., Adam et al., 2014, Deur et al., 2020). The Random Forest classifier showed a performance of 89% to classify different textures with the co-occurrence matrix (Boukir et al., 2015).

Several studies used VHR images for some tree species identification in urbanized areas (Choudhury et al., 2020, Li et al., 2015, Pu, 2011, Pu et al., 2011), but none focused on identifying vegetation in both private and public lands. The structural diversity of the vegetation in residential yards can be a good predictor of biological diversity in the urban environment (Müller et al. 2010). However, identifying plant species in private areas is challenging due to i) spatial complexity in courtyards with building and shadows presence, and ii) high plant species diversity compared with trees in the public space such as street trees. Previous studies have reported 60-70% of non-native species in private residential gardens in temperate cities (e.g., Smith et al. 2006; Cilliers et al. 2012; Vila-Ruiz et al., 2014).

Trees at public roadside and green spaces have been studied, but those in private properties were largely ignored (Cameron et al., 2012, Zhang and Jim, 2014). Reliable information on domestic gardens is lacking, mainly due to difficulties in acquiring systematic data (Cameron et al., 2012, Zhang and Jim, 2014). Therefore, studying the vegetation characteristics within private areas has become a research priority in cities (Vila-Ruiz et al., 2014, Zhang and Jim, 2014). The aim of this study was to assess the potential of VHR satellite images for classifying plant species and mapping geo-located urban vegetation and greenspaces in both public and private land over two study areas in two cities, Aix-en-Provence (France) and Florence (Italy). We developed a object-based classification using the spectral and textural characteristics and image segmentation for detection, delineation, and classification of urban tree canopies and herbaceous areas. To our best knowledge, this is the first work using VHR satellite images for detecting, extracting, and classifying more than 20 individual dominant plant species, among hundreds of thousands tree canopies detected in both private and public areas, over large urban areas (50-80 km²) at high classification accuracy.

Section snippets

Aix-en-Provence, France

Southern France is characterized by strong urbanization pressures and increasing vulnerability to climate change (Sicard and Dalstein-Richier, 2015). The population of Aix-en-Provence, located near Marseille, is estimated at approximately 143,000 people over a total surface area of 186 km². The municipality Aix-en-Provence has a Mediterranean climate (Köppen-Geiger classification). The mean annual precipitation and temperature are 568 mm and 13.6 °C, respectively.

Florence, Italy

The municipality of Florence,

Results and discussion

In the present study, given the very-high spatial and spectral resolutions (e.g., PAN band at < 0.5 m resolution) and additional bands, we examined the suitability of WV-2 satellite imagery to identify urban vegetation in both private and public areas, and map the green cover by differentiating woody and herbaceous components over two large study areas in Aix-en-Provence and Florence. The images are of excellent quality, i.e., < 2% of the area is covered by clouds or haze. A pan-sharpening

Conclusions

Green spaces within private areas provide important contributions to the sustainability of urban systems. Despite that private areas occupy a large proportion of cities; domestic gardens and private areas are seldom included in the development and management of urban greening programs by local authorities to generate and sustain urban biodiversity while the trees in private areas amount to about 85% of the trees’ population in cities. For urban climate change resilience, it is essential to

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Conceptualization, P.S., F.C., and E.P.; methodology, P.S. and F.C.; data curation, P.S., M.L. and F.C.; writing - original draft, P.S. and F.C.; writing - review & editing, P.S., J.M., Y.H., V.A., A.D.M., and E.P.; supervision, P.S. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This work was carried out with the contribution of the LIFE financial instrument of the European Union (LIFE19 ENV/FR/000086) in the framework of the AIRFRESH project “Air pollution removal by urban forests for a better human well-being”, and the Research Council of Lithuania (agreement No. S-LZ-21-3), and the Franco-Lithuanian Programme Hubert Curien (PHC) GILIBERT 2021 (46429UB). Project funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4 Component 2 Investment 1.4 - Call

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