A collection of SAR methodologies for monitoring wetlands

Abstract

Wetlands are an important natural resource that requires monitoring. A key step in environmental monitoring is to map the locations and characteristics of the resource to better enable assessment of change over time. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems are helpful in this way for wetland resources because their data can be used to map and monitor changes in surface water extent, saturated soils, flooded vegetation, and changes in wetland vegetation cover. We review a few techniques to demonstrate SAR capabilities for wetland monitoring, including the commonly used method of grey-level thresholding for mapping surface water and highlighting changes in extent, and approaches for polarimetric decompositions to map flooded vegetation and changes from one class of land cover to another. We use the Curvelet-based change detection and the Wishart-Chernoff Distance approaches to show how they substantially improve mapping of flooded vegetation and flagging areas of change, respectively. We recommend that the increasing availability SAR data and the proven ability of these data to map various components of wetlands mean SAR should be considered as a critical component of a wetland monitoring system.