EFFECT OF TEXTURAL FEATURES FOR LANDCOVER CLASSIFICATION OF UAV MULTISPECTRAL IMAGERY OF A SALT MARSH RESTORATION SITE

Abstract. Salt marshes are intertidal ecosystems valuable for services including coastal protection and carbon sequestration. Restoration of salt marshes is popular in this era of climate change and sea-level rise, especially in areas where marshes have been historically altered, including in the Bay of Fundy. Salt marsh restoration involves landcover change through time as a community of halophytic vegetation develops in the study area. Restoration sites are difficult to survey using traditional on-foot methods, and developing remote sensing methods to survey them would increase efficiency of monitoring. The purpose of our study was to assess the capability of UAV multispectral imagery to map landcovers in a salt marsh restoration site in the Musquash Estuary, New Brunswick, Canada. We used the Random Forests (RF) supervised classifier and validated our maps using field data. We also evaluated the importance of textural features by running two classifications, with and without textural features. The classification omitting textural features had lower classification and validation accuracies (96.29 % and 91.23 %, respectively) than the classification and validation accuracies obtained by including textural features (99.56 % and 96.84 %, respectively). Additional work is required to test our method in different locations and seasons.