Mangroves are one of the most important coastal wetland ecosystems, and the compositions and distributions of mangrove species are essential for conservation and restoration efforts. Many studies have explored this topic using remote sensing images that were obtained by satellite-borne and airborne sensors, which are known to be efficient for monitoring the mangrove ecosystem. With improvements in carrier platforms and sensor technology, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with high-resolution hyperspectral images in both spectral and spatial domains have been used to monitor crops, forests, and other landscapes of interest. This study aims to classify mangrove species on Qi'ao Island using object-based image analysis techniques based on UAV hyperspectral images obtained from a commercial hyperspectral imaging sensor (UHD 185) onboard a UAV platform. First, the image objects were obtained by segmenting the UAV hyperspectral image and the UAV-derived digital surface model (DSM) data. Second, spectral features, textural features, and vegetation indices (VIs) were extracted from the UAV hyperspectral image, and the UAV-derived DSM data were used to extract height information. Third, the classification and regression tree (CART) method was used to selection bands, and the correlation-based feature selection (CFS) algorithm was employed for feature reduction. Finally, the objects were classified into different mangrove species and other land covers based on their spectral and spatial characteristic differences. The classification results showed that when considering the three features (spectral features, textural features, and hyperspectral VIs), the overall classification accuracies of the two classifiers used in this paper, i.e., k-nearest neighbor (KNN) and support vector machine (SVM), were 76.12% (Kappa = 0.73) and 82.39% (Kappa = 0.801), respectively. After incorporating tree height into the classification features, the accuracy of species classification increased, and the overall classification accuracies of KNN and SVM reached 82.09% (Kappa = 0.797) and 88.66% (Kappa = 0.871), respectively. It is clear that SVM outperformed KNN for mangrove species classification. These results also suggest that height information is effective for discriminating mangrove species with similar spectral signatures, but different heights. In addition, the classification accuracy and performance of SVM can be further improved by feature reduction. The overall results provided evidence for the effectiveness and potential of UAV hyperspectral data for mangrove species identification.

The successful launch of Luojia 1-01 complements the existing nighttime light data with a high spatial resolution of 130 m. This paper is the first study to assess the potential of using Luojia 1-01 nighttime light imagery for investigating artificial light pollution. Eight Luojia 1-01 images were selected to conduct geometric correction. Then, the ability of Luojia 1-01 to detect artificial light pollution was assessed from three aspects, including the comparison between Luojia 1-01 and the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (NPP-VIIRS), the source of artificial light pollution and the patterns of urban light pollution. Moreover, the advantages and limitations of Luojia 1-01 were discussed. The results showed the following: (1) Luojia 1-01 can detect a higher dynamic range and capture the finer spatial details of artificial nighttime light. (2) The averages of the artificial light brightness were different between various land use types. The brightness of the artificial light pollution of airports, streets, and commercial services is high, while dark areas include farmland and rivers. (3) The light pollution patterns of four cities decreased away from the urban core and the total light pollution is highly related to the economic development. Our findings confirm that Luojia 1-01 can be effectively used to investigate artificial light pollution. Some limitations of Luojia 1-01, including its spectral range, radiometric calibration and the effects of clouds and moonlight, should be researched in future studies.

Automatic water body extraction method is important for monitoring floods, droughts, and water resources. In this study, a new semantic segmentation convolutional neural network named the multi-scale water extraction convolutional neural network (MWEN) is proposed to automatically extract water bodies from GaoFen-1 (GF-1) remote sensing images. Three convolutional neural networks for semantic segmentation (fully convolutional network (FCN), Unet, and Deeplab V3+) are employed to compare with the water bodies extraction performance of MWEN. Visual comparison and five evaluation metrics are used to evaluate the performance of these convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The results show the following. (1) The results of water body extraction in multiple scenes using the MWEN are better than those of the other comparison methods based on the indicators. (2) The MWEN method has the capability to accurately extract various types of water bodies, such as urban water bodies, open ponds, and plateau lakes. (3) By fusing features extracted at different scales, the MWEN has the capability to extract water bodies with different sizes and suppress noise, such as building shadows and highways. Therefore, MWEN is a robust water extraction algorithm for GaoFen-1 satellite images and has the potential to conduct water body mapping with multisource high-resolution satellite remote sensing data.