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The accurate detection of burned forest area is essential for post-fire management and assessment, and for quantifying carbon budgets. Therefore, it is imperative to map burned areas accurately. Currently, there are few burned-area products around the world. Researchers have mapped burned areas directly at the pixel level that is usually a mixture of burned area and other land cover types. In order to improve the burned area mapping at subpixel level, we proposed a Burned Area Subpixel Mapping (BASM) workflow to map burned areas at the subpixel level. We then applied the workflow to Sentinel 2 data sets to obtain burned area mapping at subpixel level. In this study, the information of true fire scar was provided by the Department of Emergency Management of Hunan Province, China. To validate the accuracy of the BASM workflow for detecting burned areas at the subpixel level, we applied the workflow to the Sentinel 2 image data and then compared the detected burned area at subpixel level with in situ measurements at fifteen fire-scar reference sites located in Hunan Province, China. Results show the proposed method generated successfully burned area at the subpixel level. The methods, especially the BASM-Feature Extraction Rule Based (BASM-FERB) method, could minimize misclassification and effects due to noise more effectively compared with the BASM-Random Forest (BASM-RF), BASM-Backpropagation Neural Net (BASM-BPNN), BASM-Support Vector Machine (BASM-SVM), and BASM-notra methods. We conducted a comparison study among BASM-FERB, BASM-RF, BASM-BPNN, BASM-SVM, and BASM-notra using five accuracy evaluation indices, i.e., overall accuracy (OA), user’s accuracy (UA), producer’s accuracy (PA), intersection over union (IoU), and Kappa coefficient (Kappa). The detection accuracy of burned area at the subpixel level by BASM-FERB’s OA, UA, IoU, and Kappa is 98.11%, 81.72%, 74.32%, and 83.98%, respectively, better than BASM-RF’s, BASM-BPNN’s, BASM-SVM’s, and BASM-notra’s, even though BASM-RF’s and BASM-notra’s average PA is higher than BASM-FERB’s, with 89.97%, 91.36%, and 89.52%, respectively. We conclude that the newly proposed BASM workflow can map burned areas at the subpixel level, providing greater accuracy in regards to the burned area for post-forest fire management and assessment.

Mixed pixels commonly exist in low-resolution remote sensing images, and they are the key factors hindering the classification of land covers and high-precision mapping. To obtain the spatial information at the subpixel level, subpixel mapping (SPM) technologies, including the pixel-swapping algorithm (PSA), that use the unmixed proportions of various land covers and allocate subpixel land covers have been proposed. However, the PSA often falls into a local optimum solution. In this paper, we propose a SPM method, the PSA_MSA algorithm, that combines the PSA and the modified simulated annealing algorithm to find the global optimum solution. The modified simulated annealing algorithm swaps subpixels within a certain range to escape the local optimum solution. The method also optimizes all the mixed pixels in a randomized sequence to further improve the mapping accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed PSA_MSA algorithm outperforms the existing PSA-based algorithms for SPM. The images with different spatial dependences are tested and the results show that the proposed algorithm is more suitable for images with high spatial autocorrelation. In addition, the effect of proportion error is analyzed by adding it in the experiments. The result shows that a higher proportion error rate leads to larger degradation of the subpixel mapping accuracy. Finally, the performance of PSA_MSA algorithm with different ranges of selection on subpixel-swapping is analyzed.

Water bodies are ubiquitous features in Arctic wetlands. Ponds, i.e., waters with a surface area smaller than 104 m2, have been recognized as hotspots of biological activity and greenhouse gas emissions but are not well inventoried. This study aimed to identify common characteristics of three Arctic wetlands including water body size and abundance for different spatial resolutions, and the potential of Landsat-5 TM satellite data to show the subpixel fraction of water cover (SWC) via the surface albedo. Water bodies were mapped using optical and radar satellite data with resolutions of 4mor better, Landsat-5 TM at 30mand the MODIS water mask (MOD44W) at 250m resolution. Study sites showed similar properties regarding water body distributions and scaling issues. Abundance-size distributions showed a curved pattern on a log-log scale with a flattened lower tail and an upper tail that appeared Paretian. Ponds represented 95% of the total water body number. Total number of water bodies decreased with coarser spatial resolutions. However, clusters of small water bodies were merged into single larger water bodies leading to local overestimation of water surface area. To assess the uncertainty of coarse-scale products, both surface water fraction and the water body size distribution should therefore be considered. Using Landsat surface albedo to estimate SWC across different terrain types including polygonal terrain and drained thermokarst basins proved to be a robust approach. However, the albedo–SWC relationship is site specific and needs to be tested in other Arctic regions. These findings present a baseline to better represent small water bodies of Arctic wet tundra environments in regional as well as global ecosystem and climate models.

Fractional green vegetation cover (FVC) is a useful parameter for many environmental and climate-related applications. A common approach for estimating FVC involves the linear unmixing of two spectral endmembers in a remote sensing image; bare soil and green vegetation. The spectral properties of these two endmembers are typically determined based on field measurements, estimated using additional data sources (e.g., soil databases or land cover maps), or extracted directly from the imagery. Most FVC estimation approaches do not consider that the spectral properties of endmembers may vary across space. However, due to local differences in climate, soil type, vegetation species, etc., the spectral characteristics of soil and green vegetation may exhibit positive spatial autocorrelation. When this is the case, it may be useful to take these local variations into account for estimating FVC. In this study, spatial interpolation (Inverse Distance Weighting and Ordinary Kriging) was used to predict variations in the spectral characteristics of bare soil and green vegetation across space. When the spatially-interpolated values were used in place of scene-invariant endmember values to estimate FVC in an Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) image, the accuracy of FVC estimates increased, providing evidence that it may be useful to consider the effects of spatial autocorrelation for spectral mixture analysis.

Capturing the dynamics of a lake-water area using remotely sensed images has always been an essential task. Most of the fine spatial resolution data are unsuitable for this purpose because of their low temporal resolution and limited scene coverage. A Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite on board the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP–VIIRS) is a newly-available and appropriate sensor for monitoring large lakes due to its frequent revisits and wide swath (more than 3000 km). However, it provides visible and infrared images at relatively coarse spatial resolutions, which would sometimes hamper the accurate mapping of lake shorelines. This study, therefore, proposes a two-step downscaling method that combines spectral unmixing and subpixel mapping to produce a finer resolution lake map from NPP–VIIRS imagery, which is then applied to delineate the shorelines of five plateau lakes in Yunnan Province, as well as the shoreline dynamics of Poyang Lake at three separate times. A newly published global water dynamic dataset is employed in this study to improve the downscaling method. Results suggest that the proposed method can generate a finer resolution lake map that exhibits more details of the shoreline than hard classification. The downscaling results of the Suomi NPP–VIIRS generally achieve higher than 75% accuracy, while the downscaling results of a Landsat-simulated fraction map could have accuracy higher than 85%. This reveals that errors and uncertainties exist in both procedures, but mainly come from the spectral unmixing procedure which retrieves water fractions from NPP–VIIRS data.

Various subpixel mapping (SPM) methods have been proposed as downscaling techniques to reduce uncertainty in classifying mixed pixels. Such methods can provide category maps of a higher spatial resolution than the original input images. The aim of this study was to explore and validate the potential of SPM as an alternative method for obtaining land use/land cover (LULC) maps of regions where high-spatial-resolution LULC maps are unavailable. An experimental design was proposed to evaluate the feasibility of SPM for providing the alternative LULC maps. A case study was implemented in the Jingjinji region of China. SPM results for spatial resolutions of 500–100 m were derived from a single 1-km synthetic fraction image using two representative SPM methods. The 1-km synthetic fraction image was assumed to be error free. Accuracy assessment and analysis showed that overall accuracies of the SPM results were reduced from about 85% to 75% with increasing spatial resolution, and that producer’s accuracies varied considerably from about 62% to 93%. SPM performed best when handling areal features in comparison with linear and point features. The highest accuracies were achieved for areas with the lowest complexity. The study concluded that the results from SPM could provide an alternative LULC data source with acceptable accuracy, especially in areas with low complexity and with a large proportion of areal features.

Subpixel mapping is a method of enhancing the spatial resolution of images, which involves dividing a mixed pixel into subpixels and assigning each subpixel to a definite land-cover class. Traditionally, subpixel mapping is based on the assumption of spatial dependence, and the spatial correlation information among pixels and subpixels is considered in the prediction of the spatial locations of land-cover classes within the mixed pixels. In this paper, a novel subpixel mapping method for hyperspectral remote sensing imagery based on a nonlocal method, namely nonlocal total variation subpixel mapping (NLTVSM), is proposed to use the nonlocal self-similarity prior to improve the performance of the subpixel mapping task. Differing from the existing spatial regularization subpixel mapping technique, in NLTVSM, the nonlocal total variation is used as a spatial regularizer to exploit the similar patterns and structures in the image. In this way, the proposed method can obtain an optimal subpixel mapping result and accuracy by considering the nonlocal spatial information. Compared with the classical and state-of-the-art subpixel mapping approaches, the experimental results using a simulated hyperspectral image, two synthetic hyperspectral remote sensing images, and a real hyperspectral image confirm that the proposed algorithm can obtain better results in both visual and quantitative evaluations.