Towards a Protocol For Remote Sensing-Based Rangeland Condition Assessment in Northern Western Australia
The assessment of rangeland condition plays an integral role in ensuring the sustainability of Western Australia’s (WA) pastoral leases. Current ground-based traverses provide a useful indication and summary of rangeland condition, but traversing is largely restricted to existing tracks and will not identify degraded areas out of sight of the traverse routes. Therefore, remote sensing is explored in this study as a potential tool for providing an assessment of range condition over broader areas. Retrospective sequences of satellite imagery were selected so as to be contemporaneous to existing transect sample dates and were processed to provide lease inspectors with: a) a historical synopsis of the temporal dynamics in the condition of an area; and b) an early warning for areas that may be more susceptible to, or trending towards, degradation. The studied area was a pastoral lease in the Fitzroy River catchment, situated in the Western Kimberley Region of WA. A soil adjusted total vegetation index (SATVI) was applied to each image. Tukey’s tests performed on the transect data showed that poor condition ratings significantly differed in SATVI response in comparison to good condition ratings. Fair condition ratings could not be separated from good condition ratings, and so were excluded. The SATVI images were reclassed into poor and good condition classes by identifying a threshold from receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. Condition class trends were illustrated by identifying transitions between classes at each temporal data point. An overall accuracy of 82% was obtained using an independent validation dataset.