Preface
Satellite images provide key information on the Earth’s environment and the impacts caused by human actions. Petabytes of Earth observation data are now open and free, making the full extent of image archives available. Using image time series, analysts make best use of the full extent of big Earth observation data collections, capturing subtle changes in ecosystem health and condition and improving the distinction between different land classes.
This book introduces sits
, an open-source R package for land use and land cover classification of big Earth observation data using satellite image time series. Users build regular data cubes from cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Planetary Computer, Brazil Data Cube, and Digital Earth Africa. The sits
API includes an assessment of training sample quality, machine learning and deep learning classification algorithms, and Bayesian post-processing methods for smoothing and uncertainty assessment. To evaluate results, sits
supports best practice accuracy assessments.
Who this book is for
The target audience for sits
is the community of remote sensing experts with Earth Sciences background who want to use state-of-the-art data analysis methods with minimal investment in programming skills. The package provides a clear and direct set of functions, which are easy to learn and master. Users with a minimal background on R programming can start using sits
right away. Those not yet familiar with R need only to learn introductory concepts.
If you are not an R user and would like to quickly master what is needed to run sits
, please read Parts 1 and 2 of Garrett Golemund’s book, Hands-On Programming with R. If you already are an R user and would like to update your skills with the latest trends, please read the book by Hadley Wickham and Gareth Golemund, R for Data Science. Important concepts of spatial analysis are presented by Edzer Pebesma and Roger Bivand in their book Spatial Data Science.
Software version described in this book
The version of the sits
package described in this book is 1.4.0.
Main reference for sits
If you use sits
in your work, please cite the following paper:
Rolf Simoes, Gilberto Camara, Gilberto Queiroz, Felipe Souza, Pedro R. Andrade, Lorena Santos, Alexandre Carvalho, and Karine Ferreira. “Satellite Image Time Series Analysis for Big Earth Observation Data”. Remote Sensing, 13, p. 2428, 2021. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13132428.
Intellectual property rights
This book is licensed as Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) by Creative Commons. The sits
package is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3.0.