Wide-Scale Identification of Small Woody Features of Landscape from Remote Sensing

Small landscape features (i.e., trees outside forest, small woody features) and linear vegetation such as hedgerows, riparian vegetation, and green lanes are vital ecological structures in agroecosystems, enhancing the biodiversity, landscape diversity, and protecting water bodies. Therefore, their monitoring is fundamental to assessing a specific territory’s arrangement and verifying the effectiveness of strategies and financial measures activated at the local or European scale. The size of these elements and territorial distribution make their identification extremely complex without specific survey campaigns; in particular, remote monitoring requires data of considerable resolution and, therefore, is very costly. This paper proposes a methodology to map these features using a combination of open-source or low-cost high-resolution orthophotos (RGB), which are typically available to local administrators and are object-oriented classification methods. Additionally, multispectral satellite images from the Sentinel-2 platform were utilized to further characterize the identified elements. The produced map, compared with the other existing layers, provided better results than other maps at the European scale. Therefore, the developed method is highly effective for the remote and wide-scale assessment of SWFs, making it a crucial tool for defining and monitoring development policies in rural environments.