Estimating the distribution of reedbed in Britain demonstrates challenges of remotely sensing rare land cover types at large spatial scales.

ABSTRACT: Common Reed Phragmites australis, globally one of the mostly widely distributed wetland plants, is important for biodiversity and for humans. However, like most wetland plant communities, reedbed has rarely been mapped at large geographical scales, restricting the information available to study reed's range dynamics or inform its management. Using Sentinel-2 data and machine learning, we aimed to produce the first published remotely-sensed reedbed map of Britain; however, accuracy as assessed by field validation was relatively low (AUC = 0.671), with many false positives (commission error of 93.4%). A similar workflow carried out in Google Earth Engine, using nearly an order of magnitude more images, gave a lower commission error but a disproportionately higher omission error. Using the kn

SUBMITTER: Davies JG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11437167 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature