Description
Degradation of arable land by soil erosion is a world-wide phenomenon and can lead to agricultural land falling unproductive. Next to the on-side effects of soil erosion on the fields, also off-site effects like the input of fertilizers and pollutants into freshwater ecosystems affects the environment.For a greater understanding of the erosion processes starting from smallest scales, recognizing, describing and quantifying soil erosion is necessary. Therefore, detailed monitoring of changes in topography over time or after heavy rainfall events is a possible approach. Recent technologies of image-matching-based surface reconstruction (Structure from Motion (SfM)) provide an option for generation of high resolution digital terrain models (DTMs), while the use of cameras mounted on unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs) allows fast, non-invasive and low-cost data acquisition.
For the presented study, erosion-prone farmland in a medium sized agricultural catchment (Lower Austria) is chosen as an area of interest. With multi-temporal data recording, the possibilities of detection and quantification of topographic dynamics on agriculturally used areas are investigated on field scale using different possibilities of 3D-data analysis. Additionally, challenges in accuracy assessment considering the level of detection (LoD). The study follows the overall aim to highlight the applicability of UAV-based remote sensing for soil degradation assessment and the related challenges on field scale.
| Period | 10 Sep 2019 |
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| Held at | Freie Universität Berlin (FU), Germany, Berlin |
| Degree of Recognition | International |