Remote sensing identification of shrub encroachment in grassland in Inner Mongolia

Abstract: Shrub encroachment has been a wide phenomenon across the arid and semi-arid grasslands in Inner Mongolia, China. Although numerous studies have investigated the effect of this phenomenon on community composition, ecosystem structure, and nutrient cycling, reports on the distribution patterns of shrub encroachment are limited. A recent development in satellite remote sensing enables accurate assessment of shrub distribution and its dynamics at large scales. In this paper, the combined ground survey in Xianghuangqi, four satellite images (with spatial resolution of 5.8 m) of ZY-3, covering nearly the whole area and taken between July and August in 2013, were used to identify the shrub distribution in this region. It should be noted that the shrub here indicated the shrub-grass mosaic due to the mixed pixel effect, and the identification was weak when the coverage of shrub was on low levels. The NDVI threshold method was first used to extract the vegetation coverage area, and then three traditional pixel-oriented methods (Support vector machine, Maximum likelihood and Mahalanobis distance), compared with the object-oriented method, were used for the classification of images. Object-oriented method is different from the traditional one, in that the classification is not based on the spectral characteristics of individual pixel, but relies on the image object with spatial texture and shape and size characteristics. Ground survey data were used to compare the accuracy level of these methods. It indicated that the shrub recognition accuracy by using support vector machine algorithm is the highest among the three pixel-oriented methods, with higher producer accuracy and user accuracy than the other two algorithms. Furthermore, the overall classification accuracy of this algorithm is 81.15% higher than that of the maximum likelihood (73.33%) and the Mahalanobis distance (61.77%). However, the overall recognition accuracy by using the object-oriented approach (combined scale 97) was up to 89.24%. It also revealed that the proportion of shrub omission and commission decreased while the combined scale of object increased. These results suggest that the object-oriented method, with high accuracy level, is much more favorable in shrub extraction from grassland background.