Protecting nationally threatened coastal ecosystems through supporting

volunteers

This project is supported by Cradle Coast NRM, through funding from the Australian Government’s National Landcare Programme

What is Natural Resource Management?

Project aims

Identify threats & prioritise activities

Support local volunteer groups

Provide spatial analysis and support

Environmental outcomes

Who are the Circular Head Landcare Group?

• Passionate group of 15 volunteers interested in local environmental issues

• Projects include – maintenance of coastal vegetation– weed control and tree planting at various sites – beach profile monitoring and shorebird counts

Nationally threatened coastal ecosystems

• Known as Subtropical and Temperate Coastal Saltmarsh (hereafter Saltmarsh)

• Listed as Vulnerable under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999

• 1,200 Ha or 20% of Tasmania

• One of the threats to saltmarsh is rice grass invasion

Source: Circular Head Region Coastal Foreshore Habitats: Sea Level Rise Vulnerability Assessment

Saltmarsh - threatening processes

• Rice grass (common cord grass) replaces saltmarsh

• Changes vegetation structure

• Reduced habitat for birds

Source: Commonwealth Conservation Advice for Subtropical and Temperate Coastal Saltmarsh

Project Management Issues

• Timing of spraying

• Control costs are high

• Spatial extent of rice grass is unknown

• Density is variable or unknown

Methods

• Current state of knowledge of rice grass distribution

• Reconnaissance of rice grass distribution

• Supervised classification

• Updated results

Current distribution

Aerial Reconnaissance

Stage 1 of project with Cradle Coast NRM from January to June 2015.

Digitising

Combine datasets

Validate results

Geoprocessing steps

Image classification

Select training samples

Extract world imagery

Spatial distributionof rice grass

Rice grass discovery

• Rice grass identified in Esri World Basemap Imagery

• Utilise the World Imagery (for Export) service to create Mosaic Dataset.

Imagery provided courtesy of DigitalGlobe, Inc. © 2015

Imagery provided courtesy of DigitalGlobe, Inc. © 2015

Issues selecting training samples

Imagery provided courtesy of DigitalGlobe, Inc. © 2015

Image Classification

Spectral signatures obtained from training samples to classify an image.

1. Select training samples (rice grass, mud flats and water)

2. Run “Interactively Supervised Classification”

3. Evaluate the results and export when happy

Imagery provided courtesy of DigitalGlobe, Inc. © 2015

Validate Results

Imagery provided courtesy of DigitalGlobe, Inc. © 2015

Provide access to archive raw imagery for analysis, January 10th 2014 selected

Commission WorldView-3 to capture data this summer over Duck Bay.

DigitalGlobe support

Imagery provided courtesy of DigitalGlobe, Inc. © 2015

Image Comparison

April 2011 January 2014

Imagery provided courtesy of DigitalGlobe, Inc. © 2015Imagery provided courtesy of DigitalGlobe, Inc. © 2015

Supervised classification results

April 2011 January 2014

Imagery provided courtesy of DigitalGlobe, Inc. © 2015Imagery provided courtesy of DigitalGlobe, Inc. © 2015

Updated Results

Combine 2011 and 2014 classification datasets

Information shared with Circular Head Landcare Group and community

Conclusion and the future

• Estimated primary rice grass control to cost $57,200 for Duck Bay

• Many analysis challenges encountered

• GIS is core business via the ArcGIS platform for NRM

• This summer will be exciting updating current datasets

End

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