Wetland Insight Tool Using Digital Earth Africa Data Cube
- Creators
- Digital Earth Africa
Description
What is it about
A Wetland is a distinct ecosystem that is flooded or saturated by water, either permanently or seasonally. The factors that distinguish wetlands from terrestrial land forms or water bodies is the characteristic vegetation and aquatic plants, adapted to the unique anoxic hydric soils. According to World Wetlands International, Africa's wetlands ecosystems are estimated to cover more than 131 million hectares delivering a wide range of ecosystems services. They include mangroves, peatlands and marshes, rivers and lakes, deltas, floodplains and flooded forests, rice-fields, and even coral reefs. Wetlands is the most diverse ecosystems as habitat to plants and animal species of wide range. The characteristic of wetlands is either freshwater, brackish or saltwater and is also classified by the dominant plants.
The Wetlands Insight Tool (WIT) is a spatiotemporal summary of a wetland that combines multiple datasets derived from the Landsat archive held within DE Africa providing insights into a wetland's seasonal and inter-annual dynamics. Fractional cover, WOfS, and Landsat surface reflectance data are retrieved from DE Africa's ODC and combined to produce a stack plot describing the percentage of a wetland polygon as vegetation fractional cover, open water, and wet vegetation through time.
This notebook allows for easy replication of analysis across Africa, through simply changing the analysis parameters. The user guide provides an overview of the analysis, resources used/supplied and directions on how to reproduce the analysis.
This knowledge package includes the necessary data, computational resources and instructions required to reproduce the methodology used in Digital Earth Africa's 'Wetlands Insight Tool' Jupyter Notebook.
The User's Guide provides an overview of the application.