No abstract

Surface water bodies, such as rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, play an irreplaceable role in global ecosystems and climate systems. Sentinel-2 imagery provides new high-resolution satellite remote sensing data. Based on the analysis of the spectral characteristics of the Sentinel-2 satellite, a novel water index called the Sentinel-2 water index (SWI) that is based on the vegetation-sensitive red-edge band (Band 5) and shortwave infrared (Band 11) bands was developed. Four representative water body types, namely, Taihu Lake, Yangtze River, Chaka Salt Lake, and Chain Lake, were selected as study areas to conduct a water body extraction performance comparison with the normalized difference water index (NDWI). We found that (1) the contrast value of the SWI was larger than that of the NDWI in terms of various water body types, including purer water, turbid water, salt water, and floating ice, which suggested that the SWI could achieve better enhancement performance for water bodies. An (2) effective water body extraction method was proposed by integrating the SWI and Otsu algorithm, which could accurately extract various water body types with high overall accuracy. The (3) method effectively extracted large water bodies and wide river channels by suppressing shadow noise in urban areas. Our results suggested that the novel method can achieve efficient water body extraction for rapidly and accurately extracting various water bodies from Sentinel-2 data and the novel method has application potential for larger-scale surface water mapping.

The functioning of the vertebrate eye depends on its absolute size, which is presumably adapted to specific needs. Eye size variation in lidless and spectacled colubrid snakes was investigated, including 839 specimens belonging to 49 genera, 66 species and subspecies. Variations of adult eye diameters (EDs) in both absolute and relative terms between species were correlated with parameters reflecting behavioral ecology. In absolute terms, eye of arboreal species was larger than in terrestrial and semiaquatic species. For diurnal species, EDs of terrestrial species do not differ from semiaquatic species; for nocturnal species the ED of terrestrial species is larger than fossorial species but not different from semiaquatic species. In relative terms, ED did not differ significantly by habitat for diurnal species. Although the ED of terrestrial species is larger than fossorial species there were no differences for nocturnal species between semiaquatic and fossorial snakes. In contrast to other vertebrates studied to date, colubrid EDs in absolute and relative terms are larger in diurnal than in nocturnal species. These observations suggest that among colubrid snakes, eye size variation reflects adaptation to specific habitats, foraging strategies and daily activities, independently of phylogeny.