Satellite-based remote sensing for monitoring land use in the sugar industry

Information on spatial and temporal changes in land use is central to the development of improved environmental and economic management practices in the Australian sugar industry. Remote sensing using satellite imagery provides an effective means of obtaining key data when compared to traditional methods of ground and aerial survey, but it has received little attention in the Australian sugar industry. A study was conducted in the Herbert River catchment aimed at assessing the utility of SPOT panchromatic, SPOT multispectral and ERS-1 RADAR imagery for accurately detecting land use and changes in land use. The results demonstrate that SPOT panchromatic imagery was able to differentiate land use based on textural information. SPOT multispectral data were able to detect land use types, but were less effective in detecting subtle differences within broadly variable land use types, such as different cane variety and crop class. It is concluded that RADAR may complement SPOT by providing information on the physical structure of a block, allowing further discrimination in tropical environments. Accordingly, a combination of SPOT and RADAR data is likely to provide appropriate data for producing efficient, accurate assessment of land use and change in cane growing regions.