Reliability of manual assessments in determining the types of vegetation on railway tracks

Abstract

Current day vegetation assessments within railway maintenance are (to a large extent) carried out manually. This study has investigated the reliability of such manual assessments by taking three non-domain experts into account. Thirty-five track images under different conditions were acquired for the purpose. For each image, the raters’ were asked to estimate the cover of woody plants, herbs and grass separately (in %) using methods such as aerial canopy cover, aerial foliar cover and sub-plot frequency. Visual estimates of raters’ were recorded and analysis-of-variance tests on the mean cover estimates were investigated to see whether if there were disagreements between the raters’. Intra-correlation coefficient was used to study the differences between the estimates. Results achieved in this work revealed that seven out of the nine analysis-of-variance tests conducted in this study have demonstrated significant difference in the mean estimates of cover (p < 0.05).