Quantifying Western U.S. Rangelands as Fractional Components with Multi-Resolution Remote Sensing and In Situ Data

Quantifying Western U.S. Rangelands as Fractional Components with Multi-Resolution Remote Sensing and In Situ Data

Blog Article

Quantifying western U.S.rangelands as a series of fractional components with remote sensing provides a new way to understand these changing ecosystems.Nine rangeland ecosystem components, including percent shrub, sagebrush (Artemisia), big sagebrush, herbaceous, annual herbaceous, litter, and bare ground cover, position-aids along with sagebrush and shrub heights, were quantified at 30 m resolution.

Extensive ground measurements, two scales of remote sensing data from commercial high-resolution satellites and Landsat 8, and regression tree models were used to create component predictions.In the mapped area (2,993,655 km²), bare ground averaged 45.5%, shrub 15.2%, sagebrush 4.

3%, big sagebrush 2.9%, herbaceous 23.0%, annual herbaceous 4.2%, and litter 15.

8%.Component accuracies using independent Fridge Deoderiser Cover validation across all components averaged R2 values of 0.46 and an root mean squared error (RMSE) of 10.37, and cross-validation averaged R2 values of 0.

72 and an RMSE of 5.09.Component composition strongly varies by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) level III ecoregions (n = 32): 17 are bare ground dominant, 11 herbaceous dominant, and four shrub dominant.Sagebrush physically covers 90,950 km², or 4.

3%, of our study area, but is present in 883,449 km², or 41.5%, of the mapped portion of our study area.