Habitat mapping of coastal wetlands using expert knowledge and Earth observation data

Long-term habitat mapping and change detection are essential for the management of coastal wetlands as well as for evaluating the impact of conservation policies. Earth observation (EO) data and techniques are a valuable resource for long-term habitat mapping. Although the use of EO data is well developed for the automatic production of land cover (LC) maps, this is not the same for habitat maps, which are highly related to biodiversity.
In a previous paper, we used the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Land Cover Classification System (LCCS) environmental attributes (e.g. water quality, lithology, soil surface aspect) for LC-to-habitat class translation. However, these environmental attributes are often not openly available, not updated or are missing.
This paper offers an alternative, knowledge-based solution to automatic habitat mapping. When only expert rules and EO data are used, the final overall map accuracy, which is obtained by comparing reference ground truth patches ...