2025 FOSS4G NA | Remote Sensing for Plants that are Hard to See - Michele Tobias
In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Michele Tobias, a data scientist at UC Davis DataLab, presents Remote Sensing for Plants that are Hard to See. Michele explores the intersection of coastal ecology and geospatial data science, focusing on the challenge of identifying beach vegetation—the "forgotten" architects of protective dune systems—using publicly available remote sensing data and open-source tools like R and QGIS.
The presentation highlights the technical difficulties of monitoring beach plants, which are often silvery or sand-covered, making standard greenness indices like NDVI ineffective. Michele tests alternative methods, including the "Cacti Index" adapted for Sentinel-2 data and topographic position indexing (TPI), while discussing the limitations of current public data resolution and the critical need for perfectly paired imagery and elevation datasets to track these rapidly changing environments.
Highlights:
🛰️ The Role of Beach Plants: Why these often-ignored plants are essential for natural coastal protection and dune building
🔄 The Monitoring Challenge: Why traditional field sampling is too slow, expensive, and physically demanding for daily beach changes
🧩 Data Constraints: The difficulty of finding paired imagery and Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) from the same temporal window
⚙️ Beyond NDVI: Why standard vegetation indices fail for succulent, reflective beach plants and the search for better spectral alternatives
🌐 Topographic Position Index (TPI): Using elevation data to identify dunes and other micro-topographic features on the sandy shore
🏢 The "Cacti Index" Experiment: Adapting desert remote sensing techniques to find silvery, high-reflectance coastal vegetation
🏗️ A Plea for Data: Why current public data resolution (10m-30m) is insufficient for beach management and the need for finer spectral bands
For more content like this check out www.projectgeospatial.com
#Geospatial #FOSS4G #RemoteSensing #CoastalEcology #BeachPlants #DuneRestoration #Sentinel2 #Rstats #QGIS #OpenSource #DataScience #ProjectGeospatial #Conservation #ClimateResilience #EcologicalMonitoring
