Mapping invasive plant species is important to establish an invasion baseline, monitor plant propagation, and to implement an effective plan to deal with the invasion. In this thesis, methods are proposed to map invasive Phragmites australis in a Great Lakes coastal wetland. Chapter 2 presents an object-based Phragmites extraction method using Worldview-2 high-spatial-resolution satellite imagery. For the 4024 ha study area at Walpole Island,Ontario, 94% overall accuracy was achieved.
Chapter 3 uses CHRIS PROBA hyperspectral satellite imagery for mapping the pixel abundance of Phragmites using a spectral mixture analysis method. An evaluation method was developed to assess the accuracy of the spectral mixture analysis fractions using the classification from Chapter 2. The overall accuracy for a Phragmites, native vegetation and water classification based on the dominant fraction in each pixel was 82.8%. A Phragmites invasion classification identifying pixels where Phragmites was non-dominant, potentially dominant, and dominant was 85.2% accurate
