Surface Water and Connectivity

Located in the southwest of Western Australia, the Swan Coastal Plain (SCP) is a global biodiversity hotspot with over 1,500 wetlands. More than 70% of the wetlands have been lost since European settlement. The SCP is located in an area affected by recent climate change that also experiences rapid urban development, as the city of Perth has been expanding over time, so has ground water abstraction for urban consumption. We used Landsat TM and ETM+ imagery from 1999 to 2011 to automatically derive a spatially and temporally explicit time-series of surface water body extent on the SCP based on decision trees. We provided the first spatio-temporally dynamic map of the water bodies of the SCP.