Dataset Information

Classification of rare land cover types: Distinguishing annual and perennial crops in an agricultural catchment in South Korea.

ABSTRACT: Many environmental data are inherently imbalanced, with some majority land use and land cover types dominating over rare ones. In cultivated ecosystems minority classes are often the target as they might indicate a beginning land use change. Most standard classifiers perform best on a balanced distribution of classes, and fail to detect minority classes. We used the synthetic minority oversampling technique (smote) with Random Forest to classify land cover classes in a small agricultural catchment in South Korea using modis time series. This area faces a major soil erosion problem and policy measures encourage farmers to replace annual by perennial crops to mitigate this issue. Our major goal was therefore to improve the classification performance on annual and perennial crops. We compared four different classification scenarios on original imbalanced and synthetically oversampled balanced data to quantify the effect of smote on classification performance. smote substantially increased the true positive rate of all oversampled minority classes. However, the performance on minor classes remained lower than on the majority class. We attribute this result to a class overlap already present in the original data set that is not resolved by smote. Our results show that resampling algorithms could help to derive more accurate land use and land cover maps from freely available data. These maps can be used to provide information on the distribution of land use classes in heterogeneous agricultural areas and could potentially benefit decision making.

SUBMITTER: Bogner C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5784906 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Classification of rare land cover types: Distinguishing annual and perennial crops in an agricultural catchment in South Korea.

Bogner Christina C Seo Bumsuk B Rohner Dorian D Reineking Björn B

PloS one 20180125 1

Many environmental data are inherently imbalanced, with some majority land use and land cover types dominating over rare ones. In cultivated ecosystems minority classes are often the target as they might indicate a beginning land use change. Most standard classifiers perform best on a balanced distribution of classes, and fail to detect minority classes. We used the synthetic minority oversampling technique (smote) with Random Forest to classify land cover classes in a small agricultural catchme ...[more]

PMID: 29370190

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Project description:Perennial bioenergy crops have significant potential to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and contribute to climate change mitigation by substituting for fossil fuels; yet delivering significant GHG savings will require substantial land-use change, globally. Over the last decade, research has delivered improved understanding of the environmental benefits and risks of this transition to perennial bioenergy crops, addressing concerns that the impacts of land conversion to perennial bioenergy crops could result in increased rather than decreased GHG emissions. For policymakers to assess the most cost-effective and sustainable options for deployment and climate change mitigation, synthesis of these studies is needed to support evidence-based decision making. In 2015, a workshop was convened with researchers, policymakers and industry/business representatives from the UK, EU and internationally. Outcomes from global research on bioenergy land-use change were compared to identify areas of consensus, key uncertainties, and research priorities. Here, we discuss the strength of evidence for and against six consensus statements summarising the effects of land-use change to perennial bioenergy crops on the cycling of carbon, nitrogen and water, in the context of the whole life-cycle of bioenergy production. Our analysis suggests that the direct impacts of dedicated perennial bioenergy crops on soil carbon and nitrous oxide are increasingly well understood and are often consistent with significant life cycle GHG mitigation from bioenergy relative to conventional energy sources. We conclude that the GHG balance of perennial bioenergy crop cultivation will often be favourable, with maximum GHG savings achieved where crops are grown on soils with low carbon stocks and conservative nutrient application, accruing additional environmental benefits such as improved water quality. The analysis reported here demonstrates there is a mature and increasingly comprehensive evidence base on the environmental benefits and risks of bioenergy cultivation which can support the development of a sustainable bioenergy industry.

Project description:Temporal variation in the composition of species assemblages could be the result of deterministic processes driven by environmental change and/or stochastic processes of colonization and local extinction. Here, we analyzed the relative roles of deterministic and stochastic processes on bird assemblages in an agricultural landscape of southwestern France. We first assessed the impact of land cover change that occurred between 1982 and 2007 on (i) the species composition (presence/absence) of bird assemblages and (ii) the spatial pattern of taxonomic beta diversity. We also compared the observed temporal change of bird assemblages with a null model accounting for the effect of stochastic dynamics on temporal beta diversity. Temporal assemblage dissimilarity was partitioned into two separate components, accounting for the replacement of species (i.e. turnover) and for the nested species losses (or gains) from one time to the other (i.e. nestedness-resultant dissimilarity), respectively. Neither the turnover nor the nestedness-resultant components of temporal variation were accurately explained by any of the measured variables accounting for land cover change (r(2)<0.06 in all cases). Additionally, the amount of spatial assemblage heterogeneity in the region did not significantly change between 1982 and 2007, and site-specific observed temporal dissimilarities were larger than null expectations in only 1% of sites for temporal turnover and 13% of sites for nestedness-resultant dissimilarity. Taken together, our results suggest that land cover change in this agricultural landscape had little impact on temporal beta diversity of bird assemblages. Although other unmeasured deterministic process could be driving the observed patterns, it is also possible that the observed changes in presence/absence species composition of local bird assemblages might be the consequence of stochastic processes in which species populations appeared and disappeared from specific localities in a random-like way. Our results might be case-specific, but if stochastic dynamics are generally dominant, the ability of correlative and mechanistic models to predict land cover change effects on species composition would be compromised.

Dataset Information

Classification of rare land cover types: Distinguishing annual and perennial crops in an agricultural catchment in South Korea.

Publications

Classification of rare land cover types: Distinguishing annual and perennial crops in an agricultural catchment in South Korea.

Similar Datasets

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