ASSESSING LANDSAT FRACTIONAL GROUND-COVER TIME SERIES ACROSS AUSTRALIA’S ARID RANGELANDS: SEPARATING GRAZING IMPACTS FROM CLIMATE VARIABILITY

Abstract. Suitable measures of grazing impacts on ground cover, that enable separation of the effects of climatic variations, are needed to inform land managers and policy makers across the arid rangelands of Australia. This work developed and tested a time-series, changepoint detection method for application to time series of vegetation fractional cover derived from Landsat data to identify irregular and episodic ground-cover growth cycles. Utilising the High Performance Computing power of the Google Cloud Compute Engine these cycles were segmented to distinguish grazing impacts from that of climate variability. A measure of grazing impact was developed using a multivariate technique to quantify the rate and degree of ground cover change. The method was successful in detecting both long term and short term growth cycles. Growth cycle detection was assessed against rainfall surplus measures indicating a relationship with high rainfall periods. During periods of ground cover decline, grazing utilisation was observed across four major grasslands. Ground cover change associated with grazing impacts was also assessed against field measurements of ground cover indicating a relationship between both field and remotely sensed ground cover. Cause and effects between grazing practices and ground cover resilience can now be explored in isolation to climatic drivers. This is important to the long term balance between ground cover utilisation and overall landscape function and resilience.