Geospatial mapping of vegetation in the Antarctic environment using very high-resolution WorldView-2 imagery

A robust monitoring of the changes in the distribution and density of cryospheric plant species requires accurate and high-resolution baseline maps of vegetation. Mapping such change at the landscape scale is often problematic, particularly in remote areas, such as Antarctica. Vegetation mapping of plant communities at fine spatial scales is increasingly supported by remote sensing technology in cryospheric regions. Less frequent imaging with high spatial resolution satellite sensors enable more detailed analyses of vegetation change frequently. This study is the first to use high-resolution WorldView-2 (WV-2) imagery to classify vegetation communities on Antarctic oases and to provide semi-automated means to map vegetation, as an imperative indicator for environmental change. Multispectral imagery (MSI) and panchromatic imagery (PAN) from very high resolution WV-2 have been used for mapping of vegetation in different forms in Antarctic environment. A range of supervised classification methods have been executed using pan-sharpened WV-2 data. This study comparatively and statistically evaluates vegetation mapping results using supervised and unsupervised classification methods to extract vegetation in Larsemann Hills and Schirmacher oasis, east Antarctica. We also discuss on the use of supervised pixel-based classifiers and textural measures, in addition to standard multispectral information, to improve the classification of Antarctic vegetation communities. Classification results were validated with independent reference datasets. This work indicates that the overall accuracy of mapping vegetation using WV-2 imagery and semi-automated target extraction methods ranged from 90% to 94%.