Detecting land-cover change using Modis time-series data

Abstract

Anthropogenic changes to forests, agriculture and hydrology are being driven by a need to provide water, food and shelter to more than six billion people. Unfortunately, these changes have a major impact on hydrology, biodiversity, climate, socio-economic stability and food security. The most pervasive form of land-cover change in South Africa is human settlement expansion. In many cases, new human settlements and settlement expansion are informal and occur in areas that are typically covered by natural vegetation. Settlements are infrequently mapped on an ad-hoc basis in South Africa which makes information on when and where new settlements form very difficult. Determining where and when new informal settlements occur is beneficial from not only an ecological but also a social development standpoint. The objective of this thesis is to make use of coarse resolution satellite data to infer the location of new settlement developments in an automated manner by making use of machine learning methods. The specific sensor that is considered in this thesis is the MODIS sensor on-board the Terra and Aqua satellites. By using samples taken at regular intervals (8 days), a hyper-temporal time-series is constructed and consequently used to detect new human settlement formations in South Africa. Two change detection methods are proposed in this thesis to achieve the goal of automated new settlement development detection using this high-temporal coarse resolution satellite time-series data.