RadWet: An Improved and Transferable Mapping of Open Water and Inundated Vegetation Using Sentinel-1

Mapping the spatial and temporal dynamics of tropical herbaceous wetlands is vital for a wide range of applications. Inundated vegetation can account for over three-quarters of the total inundated area, yet widely used EO mapping approaches are limited to the detection of open water bodies. This paper presents a new wetland mapping approach, RadWet, that automatically defines open water and inundated vegetation training data using a novel mixture of radar, terrain, and optical imagery. Training data samples are then used to classify serial Sentinel-1 radar imagery using an ensemble machine learning classification routine, providing information on the spatial and temporal dynamics of inundation every 12 days at a resolution of 30 m. The approach was evaluated over the period 2017–2022, covering a range of conditions (dry season to wet season) for two sites: (1) the Barotseland Floodplain, Zambia (31,172 km²) and (2) the Upper Rupununi Wetlands in Guyana (11,745 km²). Good agreement was found at both sites using random stratified accuracy assessment data (n = 28,223) with a median overall accuracy of 89% in Barotseland and 80% in the Upper Rupununi, outperforming existing approaches. The results revealed fine-scale hydrological processes driving inundation patterns as well as temporal patterns in seasonal flood pulse timing and magnitude. Inundated vegetation dominated wet season wetland extent, accounting for a mean 80% of total inundation. RadWet offers a new way in which tropical wetlands can be routinely monitored and characterised. This can provide significant benefits for a range of application areas, including flood hazard management, wetland inventories, monitoring natural greenhouse gas emissions and disease vector control.