🌿 Open-source workflow for detecting, screening, and validating woody vegetation change across floodplain wetlands using Digital Earth Australia Land Cover, Water Observations, Landsat Surface Reflectance NBART, Wetlands Insight Tool outputs, ANAE wetland boundaries, and river gauge data for hydrological interpretation.
This repository contains all notebooks, environment requirements, and instructions needed to reproduce the analysis, from woody transition detection and screening to figure generation and case-study wetland interpretation.
- Detection of woody vegetation encroachment and retreat from DEA Land Cover.
- Temporal stability screening of mapped transitions.
- Persistent-water masking using DEA Water Observations (WOfS).
- Spectral plausibility assessment using Landsat-derived EVI.
- Wetland case-study assessment using the Wetlands Insight Tool (WIT).
- Hydrological interpretation supported by river gauge water-level plots.
- Generation of publication-ready figures for:
- encroachment and retreat trends
- river gauge time series
- EVI hexbin comparison plots
dea-wetland-woody-change-detection/
│
├── scripts/
│ ├── 01_detect_woody_change_from_dea_land_cover.ipynb
│ ├── 02_temporal_stability_mask.ipynb
│ ├── 03a_persistent_water_mask_all_wetlands.ipynb
│ ├── 03b_persistent_water_mask_case_studies.ipynb
│ ├── 04_evi_plausibility.ipynb
│ ├── 05_wetlands_insight_tool_case_study.ipynb
│ ├── 06_plot_encroachment_retreat_trends.ipynb
│ ├── 07_plot_river_gauge_water_level.ipynb
│ └── 08_plot_evi_hexbin.ipynb
│
├── requirements.txt
├── LICENSE
├── .gitignore
└── README.md
git clone https://github.com/abbi776/dea-wetland-woody-change-detection.git
cd dea-wetland-woody-change-detection
# Create a fresh environment (recommended)
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate # Linux/Mac
venv\Scripts\activate # Windows
# Install required packages
pip install -r requirements.txtSome notebooks are designed to run in a DEA Sandbox / Open Data Cube-compatible environment with dea_tools available.
The workflow is organised into numbered notebooks for clarity:
1️⃣ Detect woody change from DEA Land Cover
scripts/01_detect_woody_change_from_dea_land_cover.ipynb
Identifies woody encroachment and retreat across wetlands using fixed 5-year intervals and custom hydrological epochs.
2️⃣ Apply temporal stability mask
scripts/02_temporal_stability_mask.ipynb
Screens transitions using majority-vote stability around baseline and target years.
3️⃣ Apply persistent-water mask using DEA Water Observations
All wetlands:
scripts/03a_persistent_water_mask_all_wetlands.ipynb
Case-study wetlands:
scripts/03b_persistent_water_mask_case_study.ipynb
Removes transitions associated with persistently inundated areas and quantifies encroachment and retreat before and after masking.
4️⃣ Assess EVI plausibility
scripts/04_evi_plausibility.ipynb
Evaluates whether mapped woody transitions are supported by Landsat-derived seasonal EVI change.
5️⃣ Wetlands Insight Tool case study
scripts/05_wetlands_insight_tool_case_study.ipynb
Generates WIT time-series outputs and normalized wetland composition plots for a selected case-study wetland.
6️⃣ Plot encroachment and retreat trends
scripts/06_plot_encroachment_retreat_trends.ipynb
Produces sub-region trend plots for 5-year intervals and hydrological periods.
7️⃣ Plot river gauge water-level time series
scripts/07_plot_river_gauge_water_level.ipynb
Generates river gauge plots used for hydrological interpretation.
8️⃣ Plot EVI hexbin comparison
scripts/08_plot_evi_hexbin.ipynb
Produces the hexbin plot comparing median ΔEVI for encroachment and retreat.
Since raw rasters and outputs are large, they are not stored in this repo.
Organize your local project like this:
data/
├── wetland boundaries/ # ANAE wetland shapefiles and case-study polygons
├── river gauge/ # River gauge CSVs or related hydrological data
└── other_inputs/ # Any additional local input files
results/
├── step_1/
├── step_2/
├── step_3/
├── step_4/
├── step_5/
└── figures/
.gitignore excludes these outputs so they don’t get pushed to GitHub.
- CSV summaries of woody transition statistics.
- Stability-filtered wetland summaries.
- Persistent-water mask summaries.
- Case-study rasters for selected wetlands.
- EVI plausibility summary tables.
- Wetlands Insight Tool CSV and plot outputs.
- Publication-ready figures including:
- Encroachment and retreat trend plots
- River gauge plots
- EVI hexbin plots
The notebook 05_wetlands_insight_tool_case_study.ipynb is adapted from Digital Earth Australia example notebooks, with modifications for the case-study wetland, output tables, and figure generation used in this project.
Contributions are welcome!
Please open an issue or submit a pull request if you would like to improve workflow efficiency, extend the notebooks to additional wetlands, or add new validation and visualization steps.
This project is licensed under the MIT License.
For questions or collaboration:
Abdullah Toqeer
PhD Candidate, Charles Sturt University
Email: toqeerabdullah776@gmail.com