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An evaluation of different approaches which use Google Street View imagery to ground truth land degradation assessments

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Abstract

Member states of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification are required to report on the proportion of land that is degraded in their countries, a requirement that is also tied into the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). National land degradation assessments are often conducted with the use of remote sensing data which are not always ground truthed. Google Street View (GSV) provides high resolution, panoramic imagery across large parts of the world that has the potential to be used to ground truth land degradation assessments. We apply three different methodologies (visual interpretation of GSV images, GSV image classification and vegetation index extraction) to derive vegetation cover estimates from Google Street View imagery for the Hardeveld bioregion of the Succulent Karoo biome in South Africa. Visual estimates of cover best predict known habitat condition values (adjusted R2 = 0.86), whilst estimates derived from an unsupervised classification of GSV images also predict habitat condition relatively well (adjusted R2 = 0.52). These results show the potential for using GSV imagery, and other large collections of ground-level landscape photographs, as a rough ground-truthing tool, especially in instances where more traditional ground-truthing approaches are not possible.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful for funding provided by the Leslie Hill Succulent Karoo Trust, administered by WWF South Africa, as well as equipment provided by the Plant Conservation Unit, University of Cape Town.

Funding

The research leading to these results received funding from the Leslie Hill Succulent Karoo Trust under Grant Agreement #ZA06217. Dr Vernon Visser was partly funded by the NRF (Grant/Award Numbers: #118593, #114696), JRS Biodiversity Foundation grant #60908 and IDRC grant #109567–001.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Plant Conservation Unit, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, Cape Town, South Africa

    Wesley Drummond Bell, Tim Kirsten & Michael Timm Hoffman

  2. Centre for Statistics in Ecology, Environment and Conservation, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, Cape Town, South Africa

    Vernon Visser

  3. African Climate and Development Initiative, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, Cape Town, South Africa

    Vernon Visser

  4. National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS), Cape Town, South Africa

    Vernon Visser

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  1. Wesley Drummond Bell
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Correspondence to Wesley Drummond Bell.

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Bell, W.D., Visser, V., Kirsten, T. et al. An evaluation of different approaches which use Google Street View imagery to ground truth land degradation assessments. Environ Monit Assess 194, 732 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-022-10438-5

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