Mapping of the Invasive Species Hakea sericea Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and WorldView-2 Imagery and an Object-Oriented Approach

Invasive plants are non-native species that establish and spread in their new location, generating a negative impact on the local ecosystem and representing one of the most important causes of the extinction of local species. The first step for the control of invasion should be directed at understanding and quantification of their location, extent and evolution, namely the monitoring of the phenomenon. In this sense, the techniques and methods of remote sensing can be very useful. The aim of this paper was to identify and quantify the areas covered by the invasive plant Hakea sericea using high spatial resolution images obtained from aerial platforms (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: UAV/drone) and orbital platforms (WorldView-2: WV2), following an object-oriented image analysis approach. The results showed that both data were suitable. WV2reached user and producer accuracies greater than 93% (Estimate of Kappa (KHAT): 0.95), while the classifications with the UAV orthophotographs obtained accuracies higher than 75% (KHAT: 0.51). The most suitable data to use as input consisted of using all of the multispectral bands that were available for each image. The addition of textural features did not increase the accuracies for the Hakea sericea class, but it did for the general classification using WV2.