The EO-! Hyperion hyperspectral imager has only moderate spatial resolution of 30 m and a relatively poor signal-to-noise ratio. How suitable is it for mapping coastal vegetation, such as salt marshes and mangroves? I have read several articles on that subject, but would like to get more opinions and discussion of results.
Depending on when cloud-free images are available, Hyperion could be one of the best sensors for this purpose. However this will be to map vegetation communities only. It's not likely that many (if any) individual species can be mapped this way, though Hyperion has been used to map some invasives.
To help answer your question better, you can write what your goal is with the mapping (e.g., mapping presence of salt marshes and mangroves; classifying them into subcategories based on vegetation type/community?)
Much of your success will depend on the spectra of the vegetation and the degree of detail you need to separate species. Generally all vegetation look similar so contrasts in their absorption spectra will depend on growing season or related phenological differences. Hyperion is a very useful sensor, but the 30 m spatial resolution is a constraint unless the cover types display sufficient spatial extent that reduced within class variability.
I agree with the previous answers. The success depend on many issues including the nature of vegetation that you want to map i.e. the extent, the mixing between different type of vegetation and also on what kind of properties that you will map from these vegetation. If the vegetation
Based on its spectral resolution, hyperion is a good sensor. If the area under investigation is large enough, and the cloud cover is low, it should be able to provide many valuable information about wetland vegetation, especially when its coupled with field data or spectral library.
It should be noted as well that the coverage of Hyperion is very limited, it's got a very limited swath width, and usually only images targets that have been requested. You might luck out, and find that hyperion images your site regularly or find out it never has. Would suggest you look at what data is aviable for your site, to determine if any even exists.
If the objective is to discriminate various species of the coastal vegetation then spectrally it would be suitable but spatial resolution could be limiting factor.
The very high spectral resolution of Hyperion, 220 bands (a bit less as some need to be removed for noise) allows great discrimination among species. Certainly, you will be able to discriminate vegetation between zones of 30 m, then it depends on the variability of species within the pixel. But for sure you can well discriminate the major vegetation types, such as salt marshes and mangroves. You will need to do two types of analysis, one using bands alone, and one using various combination of vegetation indices alone, and see which gives better results. No multispectral sensor has the capability to do so compared to an hyperspectral sensor, unless you use a different approach, and use very high resolution images e.g. iKONOS, QuickBird, and use a classification method based on training sets (your vegetation types data from the field...do you have field data available?). Hope this can help.
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