Water Wheel Sept/Oct 2024: Water And Wetlands

Abstract

Bioreach field campaign for assessing the capabilities of remote sensing blue Africa Estuaries, together with inland wetlands, are considered the most threatened ecosystem in South Africa (Skowno et al., 2019). Less than 43% of habitat maps out of the 290 estuarine functional zones (EFZs) and less than 10 of the 42 microestuaries have been digitised by various ecologists in the country to date (Van Deventer et al., in review). The images of several space-borne, remote sensing instruments, including RapidEye, Sentinel-1 and-2, and WorldView has proven useful to distinguish some wetland vegetation communities in the country, however, the use of different Light Detection and Radar (LiDAR) and hyperspectral images at higher spatial resolutions, remains to be assessed. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) funded an aerial campaign of four instruments integrated on two airborne platforms (outlined in Table 1) to capture biodiversity in the Western Cape in 2023. The NASA BioSCape campaign resulted from discussions that commenced over seven years ago.

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