Observing the Middle Elbe Biosphere in Germany by Means of TerraSAR-X Images
Research output: Journal contributions › Journal articles › Research › peer-review
Authors
The  Lower  Saxonian  Elbe  Valley  Biosphere  Reserve  is  part  of  the  UNESCO  Biosphere  Reserve  “Elbe  River  Landscape”, and used mainly for agriculture. One of tasks of the Biosphere Reserve Administration is to develop sustainable forms of land use which requires comprehensive updated land cover maps. Land use maps are hard to  produce  because  of  surveying  costs  and  time.  Nevertheless,  these  large  areas  need  to  be  monitored.  Ter-raSAR-X images are used to establish agricultural land use maps. In this study, two areas are selected within the Elbe Biosphere Reserve situated around the oxbows Wehninger Werder and Walmsburger Werder. Multi tem-poral classification methods were used to identify the different crops using maximum likelihood classifier for the years 2010 and 2011. The crop classifications were used to evaluate the effect of the number of images, the neces-sity of polarizations, and the consequences of some missing images within the crop calendar. These classificationswere  analyzed  to  estimate  producer  accuracy  and  Kappa  index  for  each  crop  besides  the  overall  accuracy  for  each agricultural land use map. The study shows that using dual polarization imagery enhances producer accu-racies for many crops over the single polarization imagery, and demonstrates the importance of using frequent images during the cultivation period.
| Original language | English | 
|---|---|
| Journal | International Journal of Geosciences | 
| Volume | 5 | 
| Issue number | 2 | 
| Pages (from-to) | 196-205 | 
| Number of pages | 10 | 
| ISSN | 2156-8359 | 
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 01.01.2014 | 
- Sustainability Science - agricultural Land use, Elbe river, Multi temporal classification, TerraSAR-X, UNESCO Biosphere reserves
Research areas
- SDG 15 - Life on Land
