Testing the capabilities of the new WorldView-3 space-borne sensor’s red-edge spectral band in discriminating and mapping complex grassland management treatments

The majority of grasslands are overused and poorly managed, globally. The overuse of these grasslands has resulted in the adoption of numerous management treatments as interventions for optimizing their productivity. However, there are limited comprehensive frameworks and objective precedents for monitoring these grasslands and rangelands. In that regard, understanding the effect of such rangeland management treatments on grassland productivity is, therefore, a critical step towards their effective conservation and sustainable management. This study sought to test the capabilities of the WorldView-3 (WV-3) satellite data derivatives in characterizing grasslands administered with different rangeland management treatments (i.e. mowing, grazing, burning, fertilizer application, and control: no-treatment), using discriminant analysis. We compared the accuracies obtained based on WV-3 standard visible and near-infrared bands and vegetation indices (VIs), excluding and including the red-edge. Results illustrate that incorporating the strategically positioned red-edge band improves the classification accuracy of the four different rangeland management treatments from 65% to 70%. Furthermore, the overall accuracy was 73% when standard VIs were used and it increased to 78% when the red-edge VIs were added to standard VIs. Other than the red-edge derivatives, the results of this study showed that the yellow, red, NIR-1, and NIR-2 bands were the most influential. The utility of fine spatial resolution sensors such as the newly launched WV-3, with strategically positioned bands (red-edge), could offer detailed information essential for the sustainable management of grasslands.