Application of reflectance ratios on high-resolution satellite imagery to remotely identify eucalypt vegetation

Abstract

The scale and accessibility of passive global surveillance have rapidly increased over time. This provides an opportunity to calibrate the performance of models, algorithms, and reflectance ratios between remote-sensing devices. Here, we test the sensitivity and specificity of the Eucalypt chlorophyll-a reflectance ratio (ECARR) and Eucalypt chlorophyll-b reflectance ratio (ECBRR) to remotely identify eucalypt vegetation in Queensland, Australia. We compare the reflectance ratio values from Sentinel-2 and Planet imagery across four sites of known vegetation composition. All imagery was transformed to reflectance values, and Planet imagery was additionally scaled to harmonize across Planet scenes. ECARR can identify eucalypt vegetation remotely with high sensitivity but shows low specificity and is impacted by the density of the vegetation. ECBRR reflectance ratios show similar sensitivity and specificity when identifying eucalypt vegetation but with values an order of magnitude smaller than ECARR. We find that ECARR was better at identifying eucalypt vegetation in the Sentinel-2 imagery than Planet imagery. ECARR can serve as a general chlorophyll indicator but is not a specific index to identify Eucalyptus vegetation with certainty.