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Acta Prataculturae Sinica ›› 2025, Vol. 34 ›› Issue (12): 73-84.DOI: 10.11686/cyxb2025024

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Identification of areas of Aconitum leucostomum incursion and monitoring of grassland degradation in the Tuohulasu grassland of Xinjiang based on multi feature fusion

Long YIN1(), Qi-fei HAN1(), Yang ZHAO2,3, Wen-xin LIU2,3   

  1. 1.School of Geographical Sciences,Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology,Nanjing 210044,China
    2.Institute of Resources and Ecology,Yili Normal University,Yining 835000,China
    3.College of Biological and Geographic Sciences,Yili Normal University,Yining 835000,China
  • Received:2025-01-20 Revised:2025-03-10 Online:2025-12-20 Published:2025-10-20
  • Contact: Qi-fei HAN

Abstract:

Land degradation through colonization by poisonous weeds does not exhibit typical land degradation characteristics such as bare ground or reduced plant biomass, making large-scale remote sensing identification of colonized areas challenging. Texture features and temporal characteristics, as important derivatives of remote sensing images, provide more detailed information on land cover, reducing the ambiguities sometimes referred to as “same object, different spectra” and “same spectra, different objects”. Information from these texture features can significantly improve classification accuracy and reliability. This study focuses on the Tuohulasu grassland in the Ili River Valley, using Sentinel-2 satellite data to extract features indicating presence of the toxic weed Aconitum leucostomum. Based on pixel-scale identification, the distribution range of A. leucostomum was determined, and its proportion in mixed pixels was calculated. Finally, the vegetation cover after excluding A. leucostomum was calculated to analyze the grassland degradation trends in the Tuohulasu grassland from 2018 to 2024. The results show that: 1) Feature selection effectively reduces information redundancy, and the combination of spectral and texture features effectively improves classification accuracy (overall accuracy 91.67%, Kappa coefficient 0.83). 2) A. leucostomum is mainly distributed in the flat areas of sunny slopes and river valleys. A. leucostomum was found in 40% of the study area, with sparse cover (0-0.25%) as the most common scenario. From 2018 to 2024, the distribution of various density levels has changed by 0.67%-1.17%. 3) After correction, the grassland degradation index changed from mild to moderate between 2018 and 2024, but the proportion of non-degraded areas increased by 1.17%, while the areas with moderate and severe degradation decreased by 1.15% and 0.70%, respectively. This study provides important methodological support for large-scale identification of toxic weeds and monitoring of grassland degradation based on multispectral data.

Key words: Tuohulasu grassland, feature selection, Aconitum leucostomum, grassland degradation