The use of combined Landsat and Radarsat data for urban ecosystem accounting in Canada

This paper describes an approach for combining Landsat and Radarsat satellite images to generate national statistics for urban ecosystem accounting. These accounts will inform policy related to the development of mitigation measures for climatic and hydrologic events in Canada. Milton, Ontario was used as a test case for the development of an approach identifying urban ecosystem types and assessing change from 2001 to 2019. Methods included decomposition of Radarsat images into polarimetric parameters to test their usefulness in characterizing urban areas. Geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA) was used to identify urban ecosystem types following an existing classification of local climate zones. Three supervised classifiers: decision tree, random forest and support vector machine, were compared for their accuracy in mapping urban ecosystems. Ancillary geospatial datasets on roads, buildings, and Landsat-based vegetation were used to better characterize individual ecosystem assets. Change detection focused on the occurrence of changes that can impact ecosystem service supply – i.e., conversions from less to more built-up urban types. Results demonstrate that combining Radarsat polarimetric parameters with the Landsat images improved urban characterization using the GEOBIA random forest classifier. This approach for mapping urban ecosystem types provides a practical method for measuring and monitoring changes in urban areas.