Semi-Automated Method for Mapping and Classifying Boreal Coastal Wetland Plant Communities using Drone and Ground...

Semi-automated plant community mapping bridges the gap between traditional ecological surveys and modern AI-assisted ecosystem monitoring, enabling site survey and monitoring at scales and speeds previously unattainable. Coastal wetlands, dominated by low-growing herbaceous plants, require a drone-based (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, UAV) photogrammetric survey to achieve higher spatial resolution and greater flexibility in timing. This protocol consists of four phases, namely UAV-based aerial survey, ground-truth data collection and georeferencing, vegetation index calculation, and supervised classification using the random forest (RF) algorithm in R (i.e., AI‑assisted, semi‑automated mapping of plant community distributions using machine‑learning classification). Key R packages used include terra, sp, sf, rgdal, raster, rsample, MLmetrics, randomForest. The emphasis in the second phase is on a traditional ecological survey method-stratified quadrat ground sampling. Ground sampling serves as ground truthing, providing empirical evidence to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the final map product. Two widely used UAV-mounted sensor types were tested: a multispectral sensor and an RGB camera, yielding 19 multispectral and 27 RGB-based indices, along with an RGB-derived digital surface model (DSM). Plant communities were mapped at a Baltic coastal wetland case study site, and the following algorithm performance results were obtained: using the multispectral dataset, the model achieved an overall accuracy of 92.3% with an out-of-bag (OOB) error of 7.75%; in comparison, the RGB dataset achieved an accuracy exceeding 98% with an OOB error of 1.14%. These results reinforce the suitability of both sensor types. Each phase of the protocol produces georeferenced datasets. These can be compiled into a layered geographical information system (GIS) Project with embedded biophysical field observations, serving as a foundation for complex ecosystem research, such as ecological modeling to forecast impacts and changes. In practice, this GIS Project can serve as a historical record of land cover and support management, environmental restoration planning, and monitoring.