Natural Heritage Trust

Wetlands Monitoring Pilot Project

Gwydir Wetlands

Simon Oliver (DEWHA)

Leo Lymburner (Geoscience Australia)
Acknowledgements
Ben Laurence-Rogers – DEWHA
Norman Mueller, Fuqin Li – Geoscience Australia (Remote Sensing
Science and Strategy)
Guy Byrne – CSIRO (Land and Water)
Laura Gow – Geoscience Australia (Groundwater)
Sam Gillingham – QNRW (Remote Sensing Centre)
Background
FARWH, Ramsar Convention and State of Environment all have
reporting requirements which could partly be fulfilled by using
information derived from remotely sensed imagery

Overarching requirement of these is the need for the ability to

report on:

‘Condition and Extent’

FARWH - National framework for the assessment of
river and wetland health
Aims to provide assessments of the impacts of resource use on
rivers and wetlands as a basis for reporting on waterway
condition at a national scale

Six key components:

1. Physical form
2. Water quality and soils
3. Aquatic biota
4. Hydrological disturbance
5. Fringing zone
6. Catchment disturbance
Ramsar Convention
Aims to halt the worldwide loss of wetlands and to conserve,
through wise use and management, those that remain.

Australia is committed to protect the Ecological Character of listed

sites.

Ecological Character – ‘sum of the biological, physical, and

chemical components of the wetland ecosystem, and their
interactions, which maintain the wetland and its products, functions,
and attributes’.
State of Environment
SoE reporting intends to provide accurate, up-to-date and
accessible information about environmental and heritage
conditions, trends and pressures for the Australian continent,
surrounding seas and Australia’s external territories.

An increase in the demand for high precision, frequent and timely

information to enable reporting on the State of the Environment
provides an important impetus for monitoring projects such as
that proposed here.
The task
Develop a system which enables automated or semi-automated
generation of statistics on environmental indicators for routine
monitoring of wetland extent and condition.

The procedures developed should be generic in nature and be able

to be applied to a wide variety of wetland types. The focus is on
repeatability, robustness and cost-effectiveness.
The indicators
a. wetted extent
b. surface water
c. bare earth
d. woody vegetation cover
e. vegetation greenness
f. area under crop
Some governing concepts
Need to be able to:
1. Discriminate
2. Characterize
3. Monitor, Identify change

Consistent and robust temporal comparison of satellite imagery

(when there is a spectral component to the classification) is
only possible when differences in sensor / solar geometry and
atmospheric effects can be effectively accounted for.
Some governing concepts
Using spectral response in conjunction with contextual information
provides a high quality, repeatable method for discriminating
land cover

Temporal signatures can be used to discriminate land cover.

Project components
1. Funding supplied through Natural Heritage Trust 2
2. Hardware purchase –dual core quad processor Sun server –
Linux RH 4.6
3. Software – Definiens Enterprise v7.0.4
4. Customised Definiens training for project members
5. Hydrogeological report to gain clear understanding of factors
affecting water availability within the catchment
6. Monitoring procedure development
 Gingham

Location
Big Leather
Gwydir Wetlands lie within Gwydir Raft
the Murray-Darling Basin in
north-east NSW

Gwydir was chosen as the Landsat polygons with MODIS information => ISO
locality for this study classification

because of the availability

of validation data and the
complexity of the system in
terms of land cover and
wetland dynamics.
 Monitoring concept
Image
temporal Image
analysis classification

Image production
and preparation Ingest to
vector database

Vector analysis

Management decisions
 Individual NBAR corrected TM scene

Surface Reflectance Correction

using MODTRAN 4.3

Adjusted to Nadir Reflectance

through BRDF inversion

BRDF shape from MODIS data

of the same time period
Stack of TM scenes
11 Landsat TM scenes (proof
of concept only) from 2004 –
final system will be entire
archive i.e. hyper-temporal

Biophysical proxies
•Vegetation Indices
•Soil Indices

Multiple scenes analysis

enables characterisation of
wetland extent and dynamics
Analysis of multi-temporal Landsat
1. Examine for long-term statistics of key indices per
pixel

simple vegetation ratio (SR – b4/b3)

cellulose absorption index (CAI – b7/b5)

maximum, minimum, mean, ratio (max/min)
and timing of max greenness through time
2. Enhances long term behaviour of land cover
systems – woody vegetation, cropping, wet areas
3. Improves boundary definition – temporal
“sharpening”
4. Reduces noise
 Object Oriented Classification
• Based on image
‘objects’ rather than
pixels

• Objects based on
long term dynamics
can be used to
analyse individual
scenes
Object Oriented Classification Cont.
Fuzzy classification system – water detection
example
Fuzzy classification system – water detection
example
January September November December

Brighton Waterhole
 Gingham (Palustrine)
Brighton Waterhole (Lacustrine)
Management implications
Characterise the long term behaviour of key wetland
indicators:
1. Inundation (Open Water)
a. Extent
b. Duration
c. Timing
2. Wetted extent
a. duration
b. timing
Provides core dataset of key biophysical parameters for
use by wetlands specialists/managers
Management implications
Characterise wetland inundation regimes for a range of
temporal scales
– Intra-annual
– Inter-annual
– Inter-decadal
Identify fundamental land use changes
Wetland->cropping
Response to flow control structures
Management implications
Trend analysis in multi-temporal data gives managers an
insight into changes in wetland characteristics.

Spatial and temporal changes in wetland characteristics

could be combined with ancillary data to provide
insight into wetland condition

Would enable decision making about planning measures

to optimise wetland health by:
• regulating groundwater use
• Identifying optimal times for environmental flow
releases
Outcomes
1. Indicators selected are repeatable and robust
2. Workflow developed and could be implemented into
a production environment
3. Initial quality assessment is encouraging – require
stratified random sample analysis to confirm quality
of results
4. Methodology is extensible to other sensors with
similar spectral and spatial attributes – Landsat gap
fill
Management implications

Ability to:
1. Monitor irrigation regimes
2. Detect clearing and other changes
3. Determine wetted extent which may influence future
water allocation for irrigation – adaptive allocation?
Future work
1. Incorporate more data in processing (subset only
here)
2. Cloud and cloud shadow masking – prototype
developed in this pilot but needs refinement
3. Avoid use of thresholds – self adaptive – further
process refinement
4. Apply to Landsat replacement dataset
5. Faster NBAR processing and access to data
What next?

1. Publish findings of the pilot (finalise the pilot)

2. Communicate and promote results and benefits
3. Secure additional funding – Caring for our country –
strong linkages with the National Dynamic Land
Cover Mapping Project .
4. For the system to become operational requires
development of data supply agreements with
providers
5. Expand pilot study to Shoalhaven Upper-
Murrumbidgee and Burdekin catchments
 Characterising broad land cover types using the
dynamics of the ‘green fraction’

2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

EV
I

Time
Coefficients that characterise time series
Slope of the ‘green up’ or growth phase
EVI

Time
‘Green up’ slope
Minimum greenness

low high
Timing of peak greenness
Combination of 3 time series coefficients
Wetland complexes
Clustering coefficient
Cropping

Grassland

Wetland

Forest
Clustering coefficients with Landsat

Use Landsat (or higher resolution) to define polygons

Field boundaries
Stands of trees
Dams
Coefficients used to place polygons into longer term
context
Clustering coefficients with Landsat
Gingham

Big Leather Gwydir Raft

Landsat polygons with MODIS information =>

ISO classification
Big Leather
Thanks …. Any questions?