Digital Commons Network^™

Studies Of Roseau Cane Dieback In The Lower Mississippi River Delta Based On Remote Sensing Data Including Landsat, Worldview, And Drone, Nan Shang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research focused on the Roseau cane (Phragmites australis) dieback assessment in the lower MRD of Louisiana and introduced a comprehensive and systematic multi-source remote sensing method for assessing wetland and Roseau cane dieback and habitat dynamics analysis from three scale levels from large-scale to small scale.

Large-scale historical vegetation/land change analyses were conducted in the lower MRD based on Landsat in the past two decades (2001 - 2021). A strong increasing trend of vegetation was found since 2005. Around 51 km² ofdieback area was detected which accounts for 11% of the overall vegetation coverage. This research …

The Importance Of Landscape Position Information And Elevation Uncertainty For Barrier Island Habitat Mapping And Modeling, Nicholas Matthew Enwright

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Barrier islands provide important ecosystem services, including storm protection and erosion control to the mainland, habitat for fish and wildlife, and tourism. As a result, natural resource managers are concerned with monitoring changes to these islands and modeling future states of these environments. Landscape position, such as elevation and distance from shore, influences habitat coverage on barrier islands by regulating exposure to abiotic factors, including waves, tides, and salt spray. Geographers commonly use aerial topographic lidar data for extracting landscape position information. However, researchers rarely consider lidar elevation uncertainty when using automated processes for extracting elevation-dependent habitats from lidar data. …

Mapping Soil Moisture From Remotely Sensed And In-Situ Data With Statistical Methods, Yaping Xu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Soil moisture is an important factor for accurate prediction of agricultural productivity and rainfall runoff with hydrological models. Remote sensing satellites such as Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) offer synoptic views of soil moisture distribution at a regional-to-global scale. To use the soil moisture product from these satellites, however, requires a downscaling of the data from an usually large instantaneous field of view (i.e. 36 km) to the watershed analysis scales ranging from 30 m to 1 km. In addition, validation of the soil moisture products using the ground station observations without an upscaling treatment would lead to cross-level fallacy. …

Out Of Site But Not Out Of Mind: Submerged Prehistoric Landscapes On The Northwestern Gulf Of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf, Amanda M. Evans

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Archaeological sites are more important than simply the artifacts they contain. Locations of human occupation and activity form a pattern that can provide information about perceptions of the landscape, decisions about resources, or preferences. Explaining this “perceived” environment is one of archaeology’s goals in explaining past human behavior. In order to address these goals, archaeologists must first identify elements of the “real” landscape, including the geographical environment, its resources, and evidence of human modification. Only after these real elements have been identified can the perceived environment be explored. On the outer continental shelf of the northwestern Gulf of Mexico, formerly …

An Object-Based Image Analysis Approach For Detecting Urban Impervious Surfaces, Amit Kulkarni

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Impervious surfaces are manmade surfaces which are highly resistant to infiltration of water. Previous attempts to classify impervious surfaces from high spatial resolution imagery with pixel-based techniques have proven to be unsuitable for automated classification because of its high spectral variability and complex land covers in urban areas. Accurate and rapid classification of impervious surfaces would help in emergency management after extreme events like flooding, earthquakes, fires, tsunami, and hurricanes, by providing quick estimates and updated maps for emergency response. The objectives of this study were to: (1) compare classification accuracy between pixel-based and OBIA methods, (2) examine whether the …

Detecting The Socioeconomic Conditions Of Urban Neighborhoods Through Wavelet Analysis Of Remotely Sensed Imagery, Guiyun Zhou

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Wavelet analysis is an efficient approach to studying textural patterns at different scales. Artificial neural networks can learn very complex patterns in the data and could be an efficient classifier. However, whether wavelet analysis, in combination with artificial neural networks or other classifiers, can be used to detect the social-economic conditions of urban neighborhood is a key research question that needs further study. The hypotheses of this study were: 1) neural networks yielded higher classification accuracy than linear discriminant analysis and the minimum-distance classifier based on wavelet measures of urban land covers; 2) wavelet textural measures could be used to …

Spatial Characteristics Of The Remotely-Sensed Surface Urban Heat Island In Baton Rouge, La: 1988-2003, Lynn Copeland Hardegree

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Our understanding of urban effects on local climate remains unsatisfactory due to several difficulties: 1) the inherent complexity of the city-atmosphere system, 2) lack of a clear conceptual theoretical framework for inquiry, and 3) the high expense and enormous difficulties of acquiring a sufficient quantity of high-quality, high-resolution (both spatially and temporally) observations in cities. Using remotely-sensed data, this study analyzes urban heat islands (UHI) that are manifested through an elevation in the surface thermal emissions within urban regions known as surface heat islands (SHI). The study area for this research endeavor is Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Whereas the surface air …

Fractal Compression And Analysis On Remotely Sensed Imagery, Ke Xiao

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Remote sensing images contain huge amount of geographical information and reflect the complexity of geographical features and spatial structures. As the means of observing and describing geographical phenomena, the rapid development of remote sensing has provided an enormous amount of geographical information. The massive information is very useful in a variety of applications but the sheer bulk of this information has increased beyond what can be analyzed and used efficiently and effectively. This uneven increase in the technologies of gathering and analyzing information has created difficulties in its storage, transfer, and processing. Fractal geometry provides a means of describing and …