False color gives a true impression

by Greg Fanslow

MAPS

or this issues article on bird diversity and wetland conversion (see Balanced on a wing on pages 3436), Rice Today needed a landcover map of Candaba marsh to compare historical and current conditions and plan a eld visit. The only available maps werent detailed enough and hadnt been updated since the mid-1970s, so the IRRI Geographic Information Systems lab used freely available LandSat data from the Global Land Cover Facility (http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/index. shtml) at the University of Maryland in the USA. Because of our interest in vegetation cover, satellite data were reprocessed into false color images that exploit the high infrared reectance of chlorophyllthe green pigment in plantsto render vegetation patterns. The image is termed false color because the imaging process displays the intensities of red, green, and infrared radiation recorded by satellite sensors as shades of, respectively, green, blue, and red instead (see https://zulu.ssc.nasa.gov/mrsid/ tutorial/Landsat%20Tutorial-V1.html). In the resulting image, vegetation is in varying shades of red, water is blue, and bare or fallow areas are light brown.
After eld visits to several areas shown on the 2002 false color map (bottom right), image-processing software was used to characterize the spectral signature of areas under rice cultivation (green on map below) and sh ponds (blue). These signatures were then automatically applied to the rest of the image to approximate the extent of these types of land cover. While signicant work on the ground would be needed to fully validate these results, they give a general impression of the extent of sh ponds and agricultural elds and illustrate the power of remote-sensing analysis to facilitate studies of landscape-scale phenomena.

False color images of Candaba marsh on 17 March 1976 and 3 April 2002. While there were small dierences in the infrared data collected between the two years, this comparison gives an immediate sense of the magnitude of change that has occurred to the landscape due to construction of agricultural elds and, to a lesser extent, sh ponds.

17 March 1976

3 April 2002

2002

IMAGE PROCESSED BY AILEEN MAUNAHAN (3)

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Rice Today July-September 2006