The use of modified and unmodified digital cameras to monitor small-scale savannah rangeland vegetation

Abstract

Savannah rangelands provide a significant source of income for rural communities, which use them to manufacture a variety of products. Traditionally, rangeland managers used visual and/or physical monitoring methods that were time-consuming, labour-intensive, and expensive. The applicability of these methods to assessing rangeland vegetation remains largely unknown. Photographs taken digital integrating analyzed qualitatively or statistically, and analysis can focus on individual species or integrate data from the entire field of view into a community or canopy-level picture. This technique attempts to bridge the gap between ground-based observations and satellite remote sensing. What motivated the review of this digital camera is that the system has proven to be inexpensive in other studies and because images can be analyzed either quantitatively or qualitatively, and the analysis can focus on individual species or integrate across the field of view or canopy-level perspective. Digital cameras were discovered to be scientific instruments capable of accurately estimating and measuring vegetation parameters only recently in crop sciences, where they are used to detect flowering success or track phenological stages in monospecific crop stands. By reducing the labour-intensive nature of monitoring at the field scale with camera-based remote sensing, these effective applications demonstrate the vast potential of camera-based remote sensing. Digital Image Analysis (DIA) offers a more continuous method of capturing data, storing and transferring it electronically to a computer, and processing it with image-analysis software. The number of data that can be collected each day at a given time is limited as opposed to visual estimations.