Mapping the spatial distribution and changes of oil palm land cover using an open source cloud-based mapping platform

Oil palm has become well known for its oil palm yields that can be used to produce food, biodiesel and biogas. The rapid expansion of oil palm plantations over large areas has changed the land use and land cover of surroundings. Changes in land covers can be mapped and later used for further analysis. However, obtaining and classifying large coverages require massive amounts of data and computing resources and the skills and time of analysts. The Remote Ecosystem Monitoring Assessment Pipeline (REMAP) provides a cloud computing platform that hosts an open-source stacked Landsat data that allows land cover classification to be implemented using a built-in random forest supervised machine learning algorithm. Classifications were performed with the aid of predictor layers to discriminate the following land covers in Peninsular Malaysia: oil palm, built-up, bare soil, water, forest, other vegetation and paddy. The classification performed on period 1 (1999–2003) and period 2 (2014–2017) data produced an overall accuracy of 80.34% and 79.53% respectively. The analysis of the changes in oil palm distributions from period 1 to period 2 indicated an increment of 23.59%. Further analysis revealed that oil palm expansion in Peninsular Malaysia only minimally affected forested area and is mostly resulted from the conversion of less productive crops to oil palm. Results prove the land cover mapping and change detection capabilities of REMAP as a cloud computing platform for large areas. Despite its limitations, REMAP has the potential to achieve fast-paced mapping over large areas and monitor land changes in oil palm distributions

Oil Palm Mapping Over Peninsular Malaysia Using Google Earth Engine and Machine Learning Algorithms

Oil palm plays a pivotal role in the ecosystem, environment, economy and without proper monitoring, uncontrolled oil palm activities could contribute to deforestation that can cause high negative impacts on the environment and therefore, proper management and monitoring of the oil palm industry are necessary. Mapping the distribution of oil palm is crucial in order to manage and plan the sustainable operations of oil palm plantations. Remote sensing provides a means to detect and map oil palm from space effectively. Recent advances in cloud computing and big data allow rapid mapping to be performed over large a geographical scale. In this study, 30 m Landsat 8 data were processed using a cloud computing platform of Google Earth Engine (GEE) in order to classify oil palm land cover using non-parametric machine learning algorithms such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Classification and Regression Tree (CART) and Random Forest (RF) for the first time over Peninsular Malaysia. The hyperparameters were tuned, and the overall accuracy produced by the SVM, CART and RF were 93.16%, 80.08% and 86.50% respectively. Overall, the SVM classified the 7 classes (water, built-up, bare soil, forest, oil palm, other vegetation and paddy) the best. However, RF extracted oil palm information better than the SVM. The algorithms were compared and the McNemar's test showed significant values for comparisons between SVM and CART and RF and CART. On the other hand, the performance of SVM and RF are considered equally effective. Despite the challenges in implementing machine learning optimisation using GEE over a large area, this paper shows the efficiency of GEE as a cloud-based free platform to perform bioresource distributions mapping such as oil palm over a large area in Peninsular Malaysia

Design of biomass value chains that are synergistic with the food-energy-water nexus: strategies and opportunities

Humanity’s future sustainable supply of energy, fuels and materials is aiming towards renewable sources such as biomass. Several studies on biomass value chains (BVCs) have demonstrated the feasibility of biomass in replacing fossil fuels. However, many of the activities along the chain can disrupt the food–energy–water (FEW) nexus given that these resource systems have been ever more interlinked due to increased global population and urbanisation. Essentially, the design of BVCs has to integrate the systems-thinking approach of the FEW nexus; such that, existing concerns on food, water and energy security, as well as the interactions of the BVCs with the nexus, can be incorporated in future policies. To date, there has been little to no literature that captures the synergistic opportunities between BVCs and the FEW nexus. This paper presents the first survey of process systems engineering approaches for the design of BVCs, focusing on whether and how these approaches considered synergies with the FEW nexus. Among the surveyed mathematical models, the approaches include multi-stage supply chain, temporal and spatial integration, multi-objective optimisation and uncertainty-based risk management. Although the majority of current studies are more focused on the economic impacts of BVCs, the mathematical tools can be remarkably useful in addressing critical sustainability issues in BVCs. Thus, future research directions must capture the details of food–energy–water interactions with the BVCs, together with the development of more insightful multi-scale, multi-stage, multi-objective and uncertainty-based approaches