Vegetation changes in Yellow River Delta wetlands from 2018 to 2020 using PIE-Engine and short time series Sentinel-2 images

Vegetation is the functional subject in the wetland ecosystem and plays an irreplaceable role in biodiversity conservation. It is of great significance to monitor wetland vegetation for scientific assessment of the impact of vegetation on ecological environment and biodiversity. In this paper, a method for extracting wetland vegetation based on short time series Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data set was constructed. First, time series NDVI data were constructed using Sentinel-2 images. Then, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier was used to classify the wetland vegetation types. The distributions of the main wetland vegetation in the study area in 2018 and 2020 were got. Finally, the land cover transfer matrix was calculated to analyze the spatial pattern and change of wetland vegetation emphatically from 2018 to 2020. Based on 46 Sentinel-2 images acquired in 2018 and 2020, the spatial pattern and change of vegetation in the Yellow River Delta wetlands were extracted and analyzed in this paper. The results show that: (1) The method for extracting wetland vegetation in estuary delta based on PIE-Engine platform and short time series NDVI data constructed in this paper can effectively extract the wetland vegetation information. The overall accuracy of the classification results reached 90.47% in 2018 and 80.30% in 2020. The Kappa coefficient of the classification results are 0.874 in 2018 and 0.739 in 2020 respectively. Compared with the results from the random forest classification method and the maximum likelihood classification method, the accuracy is improved by 6.40% and 13.04%, and the Kappa coefficient is improved by 0.055 and 0.069. (2) There were significant changes in vegetation coverage in the Yellow River Delta wetlands from 2018 to 2020. The Spartina alterniflora increased by 3.74km2. The Suaeda salsa degraded seriously, and the total area decreased by 20.38km2. In addition, the increase of Spartina alterniflora effectively guaranteed the stability of the coastline in the study area. This study can provide a theoretical basis for wetlands vegetation classificaton, and the classificaton results can provide scientific reference for protecting the ecological environment of wetlands and maintaining ecological stability.