A Rapidly Assessed Wetland Stress Index (RAWSI) Using Landsat 8 and Sentinel-1 Radar Data

Wetland ecosystems are important resources, providing great economic benefits for surrounding communities. In this study, we developed a new stress indicator called “Rapidly Assessed Wetlands Stress Index” (RAWSI) by combining several natural and anthropogenic stressors of wetlands in Delaware, in the United States. We compared two machine-learning algorithms, support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF), to quantify wetland stress by classifying satellite images from Landsat 8 and Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). An accuracy assessment showed that the combination of Landsat 8 and Sentinel SAR data had the highest overall accuracy (93.7%) when used with an RF classifier. In addition to the land-cover classification, a trend analysis of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) calculated from Landsat images during 2004–2018 was used to assess changes in healthy vegetation. We also calculated the stream sinuosity to assess human alterations to hydrology. We then used these three metrics to develop RAWSI, and to quantify and map wetland stress due to human alteration of the landscape. Hot-spot analysis using Global Moran’s I and Getis-Ord Gi* identified several statistically significant hot spots (high stress) in forested wetlands and cold spots (low values) in non-forested wetlands. This information can be utilized to identify wetland areas in need of further regulation, with implications in environmental planning and policy decisions.