Evaluation on Spaceborne Multispectral Images, Airborne Hyperspectral, and LiDAR Data for Extracting Spatial Distribution and Estimating Aboveground Biomass of Wetland Vegetation Suaeda salsa

Suaeda salsa (S. salsa) has a significant protective effect on salt marshes in coastal wetlands. In this study, the abilities of airborne multispectral images, spaceborne hyperspectral images, and LiDAR data in spatial distribution extraction and aboveground biomass (AB) estimation of S. salsa were explored for mapping the spatial distribution of S. salsa AB. Results showed that the increasing spectral and structural features were conducive to improving the classification accuracy of wetland vegetation and the AB estimation accuracy of S. salsa. The fusion of hyperspectral and LiDAR data provided the highest accuracies for wetlands classification and AB estimation of S. salsa in the study. Multispectral images alone provided relatively high user's and producer's accuracies of S. salsa classification (87.04% and 88.28%, respectively). Compared to multispectral images, hyperspectral data with more spectral features slightly improved the Kappa coefficient and overall accuracy. The AB estimation reached a relatively reliable accuracy based only on hyperspectral data (R-2 of 0.812, root-mean-square error of 0.295, estimation error of 24.56%, residual predictive deviation of 2.033, and the sums of squares ratio of 1.049). The addition of LiDAR data produced a limited improvement in the process of extraction and AB estimation of S. salsa. The spatial distribution of mapped S. salsa AB was consistent with the field survey results. This study provided an important reference for the effective information extraction and AB estimation of wetland vegetation S. salsa.