Aerial remote sensing is a technology with the potential to identify plant species, delineate vegetation and habitat characteristics, differentiate vegetation stress, and characterize soil properties. This technology can be used in range management as a tool to map various plant communities so as to determine current range production. Mapping of unpalatable rangeland species using remotely sensed data provides temporal and spatial information for monitoring and managing rangeland productivity for livestock and wildlife utilization. This study was designed to explore the ability of National Agricultural Imagery Program images for mapping of cholla cactus (Opuntia imbricate) on a semi-arid rangeland in 2008 and 2010. The secondary objective was to assess and compare the resulting classification accuracies for both years. Accuracy assessment revealed that the overall accuracies were greater than 70% for the classified images in both years. These results indicate that repeated detection of the cholla cactus in a spatial and temporal context is possible using aerial remote sensing.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.