UAV-Based Wetland Monitoring: Multispectral and Lidar Fusion with Random Forest Classification

As sea levels rise and temperatures increase, vegetation communities in tropical and sub-tropical coastal areas will be stressed; some will migrate northward and inland. The transition from coastal marshes and scrub–shrubs to woody mangroves is a fundamental change to coastal community structure and species composition. However, this transition will likely be episodic, complicating monitoring efforts, as mangrove advances are countered by dieback from increasingly impactful storms. Coastal habitat monitoring has traditionally been conducted through satellite and ground-based surveys. Here we investigate the use of UAV-LiDAR (unoccupied aerial vehicle– light detection and ranging) and multispectral photogrammetry to study a Florida coastal wetland. These data have higher resolution than satellite-derived data and are cheaper and faster to collect compared to crewed aircraft or ground surveys. We detected significant canopy change in the period between our survey (2020–2022) and a previous survey (2015), including loss at the scale of individual buttonwood trees (Conocarpus erectus), a woody mangrove associate. The UAV-derived data were collected to investigate the utility of simplified processing and data inputs for habitat classification and were validated with standard metrics and additional ground truth. UAV surveys combined with machine learning can streamline coastal habitat monitoring, facilitating repeat surveys to assess the effects of climate change and other change agents.