Assessing Water Quality and Vegetation Changes under Changing Climate Using Machine Learning and High-Resolution UAV Imagery

A special issue of Water (ISSN 2073-4441). This special issue belongs to the section "New Sensors, New Technologies and Machine Learning in Water Sciences".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 December 2023) | Viewed by 1466

Special Issue Editors

Key Laboratory of Water Sediment Sciences, College of Water Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Interests: UAV remote sensing; machine learning; deep learning; phenology extraction; yield prediction; data fusion
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Earth and Space Sciences, South University of Science and Technology of China, Shenzhen 518055, China
Interests: GNSS data processing and application
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail
Guest Editor
Key Laboratory of Crop Genetics and Physiology of Jiangsu Province, College of Agriculture, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou 225009, China
Interests: DSSAT model; wheat; genetic parameters; global sensitivity analysis; time series

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Global warming has been an ongoing issue for decades, and it has profoundly influenced water quality and vegetation growth. Timely prediction of water quality and variation of vegetation is of great importance to society. With the quick development of computation speed, machine-learning-based data analysis has grown in popularity. The purpose of this Special Issue is to present new research advances on the applications of remote sensing techniques, such as multi-/hyperspectral satellites and UAVs, to monitor changes in water quality and vegetation growth under a changing climate. Contributions focusing on new methods and applications in assessing water quality, vegetation growth monitoring—in particular, new approaches and novel contributions using machine learning—and deep learning methods, specifically studies based on multispectral and hyperspectral from multiple platforms, are welcome. The scope of this Special Issue includes but is not limited to the following:

  • Water quality monitoring using multispectral and hyperspectral images;
  • Mapping vegetation phenology;
  • Vegetation growth monitoring;
  • Time-series analysis monitoring of agriculture and forest;
  • High-throughput phenomics.

Dr. Yahui Guo
Dr. Shunqiang Hu
Dr. Haijiao Ma
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Water is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • water quality monitoring using remote sensing and machine learning
  • climate change impacts on vegetation growth
  • data analysis using machine learning and deep learning
  • data fusion
  • time-series analysis

Published Papers (1 paper)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

22 pages, 14287 KiB  
Article
Analysis of Vegetation Dynamics and Driving Mechanisms on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in the Context of Climate Change
by Yinghui Chang, Chuncheng Yang, Li Xu, Dongfeng Li, Haibin Shang and Feiyang Gao
Water 2023, 15(18), 3305; https://doi.org/10.3390/w15183305 - 19 Sep 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1048
Abstract
The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (TP) is susceptible to climate change and human activities, which brought about drastic alterations in vegetation on the plateau. However, the trends and driving mechanisms of vegetation changes remain unclear. Therefore, the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was used to [...] Read more.
The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (TP) is susceptible to climate change and human activities, which brought about drastic alterations in vegetation on the plateau. However, the trends and driving mechanisms of vegetation changes remain unclear. Therefore, the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was used to analyze the spatiotemporal distribution of vegetation and the consistency of dynamic trends in the TP from 2000 to 2020 in this study. The independent contributions and interactive factors of natural and human activities on vegetation changes were investigated through the Geodetector model. The drivers of vegetation under different dry–wet zones and precipitation gradients were quantitatively separated, and the internal mechanisms of vegetation changes were discussed from multiple perspectives. The results showed that from 2000 to 2020, the NDVI had an overall increasing trend, with an increasing rate of 0.0027 a−1, and the spatial pattern was different, increasing gradually from the northwest to the southeast. Consistent improvement occurred in the central and southeastern parts of the TP, while the western and northern parts consistently deteriorated. The annual mean precipitation had the greatest explanatory power for vegetation changes (0.781). The explanatory power of the integrated effects between two factors was greater than that of individual factors. The integrated effects between annual mean precipitation and other driving factors had the strongest explanatory power on vegetation variations. The driving mechanisms of vegetation dynamics varied among different dry–wet zones, and the vegetation growth was more sensitive to the response of precipitation in arid and semi-arid climate zones. This study enhances our understanding of the intrinsic mechanisms of vegetation changes on the plateau, which can provide a reference for ecological conservation, and has implications for further prediction and assessment of vegetation ecosystem stability. Full article
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop