A flexible multi‐source spatial‐data fusion system for environmental status assessment at continental scale

Abstract

The monitoring of the environment's status at continental scale involves the integration of information derived by the analysis of multiple, complex, multidisciplinary, and large‐scale phenomena. Thus, there is a need to define synthetic Environmental Indicators (EIs) that concisely represent these phenomena in a manner suitable for decision‐making. This research proposes a flexible system to define EIs based on a soft fusion of contributing environmental factors derived from multi‐source spatial data (mainly Earth Observation data). The flexibility is twofold: the EI can be customized based on the available data, and the system is able to cope with a lack of expert knowledge. The proposal allows a soft quantifier‐guided fusion strategy to be defined, as specified by the user through a linguistic quantifier such as ‘most of’. The linguistic quantifiers are implemented as Ordered Weighted Averaging operators. The proposed approach is applied in a case study to demonstrate the periodical computation of anomaly indicators of the environmental status of Africa, based on a 7‐year time series of dekadal Earth Observation datasets. Different experiments have been carried out on the same data to demonstrate the flexibility and robustness of the proposed method.

Keywords:

• Environmental indicator
• Continental scale
• Fuzzy integration
• OWA
• Satellite data

Acknowledgements

This work has been carried out within the Observatory for Land cover and Forest change (OLF) of the GeoLand project (2004–2006). GeoLand (http://www.gmes‐geoland.info) is an Integrated Project of the European Union 6th Framework Programme focusing on GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) priorities ‘Land cover change & environmental stress in Europe’ and ‘Global vegetation monitoring’. Particular thanks to Bruno Combal (JRC‐EC) who provided time series of data on vegetation phenology in the frame of GeoLand‐OLF activities. The authors also wish to thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments.