Monitoring Tamarix Changes Using WorldView-2 Satellite Imagery in Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona

A significant decline in tamarisk canopy cover, amounting to 29.5% between 2009 and 2019, was detected in Grand Canyon National Park using high-resolution WorldView-2 satellite imagery. This study employed a Spectral Angle Mapper (SAM) supervised classification method with images from May and August 2019, achieving overall accuracies of 80.0% and 83.1%, respectively. Seasonal change detection revealed that 47.5% of healthy tamarisk detected in May had been defoliated by August within the study area. These findings suggest that the impacts of the introduced northern tamarisk beetle, a biocontrol agent for tamarisk, continue to accumulate despite its presence since 2012, highlighting the ongoing ecological changes in this UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Bransky, N., Sankey, T., B. Sankey, J., Johnson, M., & Jamison, L. (2021). Monitoring Tamarix Changes Using WorldView-2 Satellite Imagery in Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona. Remote Sensing, 13(5), 958. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13050958