Estimating fractional cover of saltmarsh vegetation species in coastal wetlands in the Yellow River Delta, China using ensemble learning model

Saltmarshes in coastal wetlands provide important ecosystem services. Satellite remote sensing has been widely used for mapping and classification of saltmarsh vegetation, however, medium-spatial-resolution satellite datasets such as Landsat-series imagery may induce mixed pixel problems over saltmarsh landscapes which are spatially heterogeneous. Sub-pixel fractional cover estimation of saltmarsh vegetation at species level are required to better understand the distribution and canopy structure of saltmarsh vegetation. In this study, we presented an approach framework for estimating and mapping the fractional cover of major saltmarsh species in the Yellow River Delta, China based on time series Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager data. To solve the problem that the coastal area is frequently covered by clouds, we adopted the recently developed virtual image-based cloud removal (VICR) algorithm to reconstruct missing image values under the cloud/cloud shadows over the time series Landsat imagery. Then, we developed an ensemble learning model (ELM), which incorporates Random Forest Regression (RFR), K-Nearest Neighbor Regression (KNNR) and Gradient Boosted Regression Tree (GBRT) based on temporal-spectral features derived from the time-series cloudless images to estimate the fractional cover of major vegetation types, i.e., Phragmites australis, Suaeda salsa and the invasive species, Spartina alterniflora. High spatial resolution imagery acquired by the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Gaofen-6 satellites were used for reference sample collections. The results showed that our approach successfully estimated the fractional cover of each saltmarsh species (average of R-square:0.891, RMSE: 7.48%). Through four scenarios of experiments, we found that the ELM is advantageous over each individual model. When the images during key months were absent, cloud removal for the Landsat images considerably improved the estimation accuracies. In the study area, Spartina alterniflora covers the largest area (5753.97 ha), followed by Phragmites australis with spatial extent area of 4208.4 ha and Suaeda salsa of 1984.41 ha. The average fractional cover of S. alterniflora was 58.45%, that of P. australis was 51.64% and that of S.salsa was 51.64%.