Klaas Pauly

Flemish Institute for Technological Research | VITO · Remote Sensing Unit

The adoption of fixed wing unmanned aircraft systems has greatly increased in recent years with the advent of affordable yet high-end platforms such as the Trimble UX5. However, the process of measuring in UAS surveys is laborious. Placing and measuring ground control point markers, and indicating the points of measurement in the imagery has tradit...

Crop advisors and farmers increasingly use drone data as part of their decision making. However, the vast majority of UAS-based vegetation mapping services support only the calculation of a relative NDVI derived from compressed JPEG pixel values and do not include the possibility to include more complex aspects like soil correction. In our ICPA12 c...

PROBA/CHRIS is one of the first satellite sensors to offer both high spatial and spectral resolutions. We explored the potential of this sensor to map the dynamics of seaweed and coral cover in an area influenced by seasonal upwelling in the Arabian Sea. Quantitative field assessments coincided with image acquisitions. After removal of sensor noise...

Aim: The oceans harbour a great diversity of organisms whose distribution and ecological preferences are often poorly understood. Species distribution modelling (SDM) could improve our knowledge and inform marine ecosystem management and conservation. Although marine environmental data are available from various sources, there are currently no user...

Worldwide blooms of the green alga Trichosolen have been reported on damaged coral reefs following catastrophic events. However, the global distribution of Trichosolen and the factors triggering such blooms remained elusive because of a paucity of occurrence records. This study presents a presence-only niche modelling approach to map the potential...

The recent developments in the performance and miniaturization of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and multispectral imaging sensors provide new tools for the assessment of the spatial and temporal variability of soil properties at sub-meter resolution and at relatively low costs, in comparison to traditional chemical analysis. The accuracy of multi...

Detailed knowledge of the intra‐field variability of soil properties and crop characteristics is indispensable for the establishment of sustainable precision agriculture. We present an approach that combines ground‐based agrogeophysical soil and aerial crop data to delineate field‐specific management zones that we interpret with soil attribute meas...

Pine Wilt Disease is one of the most destructive pests affecting coniferous forests. After being infected by the harmful Bursaphelenchus xylophilus nematode, most trees die within one year. The complex spreading pattern of the disease and the tedious hard labor process of diagnosis involving field wood sampling followed by laboratory analysis call...

High quality fruit production requires the regulation of the crop load on fruit trees by reducing the number of flowers and fruitlets early in the growing season, if the bearing is too high. Several automated flower cluster quantification methods based on proximal and remote imagery methods have been proposed to estimate flower cluster numbers, but...

Detection of humans, e.g. for search and rescue operations has been enabled by the availability of compact, easy to use cameras and drones. On the other hand, aerial photogrammetry techniques for inspection applications allow for precise geographic localization and the generation of an overview orthomosaic and 3D terrain model. The proposed solutio...

Consumer cameras, particularly onboard smartphones and UAVs, are now commonly used as scientific instruments. However, their data processing pipelines are not optimized for quantitative radiometry and their calibration is more complex than that of scientific cameras. The lack of a standardized calibration methodology limits the interoperability bet...

Early and precise spatio-temporal monitoring of tree vitality is key for steering management decisions in pome fruit orchards. Spaceborne remote sensing instruments face a tradeoff between spatial and spectral resolution, while manned aircraft sensor-platform systems are very expensive. In order to address the shortcomings of these platforms, this...

Consumer cameras, particularly onboard smartphones and UAVs, are now commonly used as scientific instruments. However, their data processing pipelines are not optimized for quantitative radiometry and their calibration is more complex than that of scientific cameras. The lack of a standardized calibration methodology limits the interoperability bet...

Imaging with a conventional frame camera from a moving remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS) is by design very inefficient. Less than 1 % of the flying time is used for collecting light. This unused potential can be utilized by an innovative imaging concept, the spatio-spectral camera. The core of the camera is a frame sensor with a large number...

Crop advisors and farmers increasingly use drone data as part of their decision making. However, the vast majority of UAS-based vegetation mapping services support only the calculation of a relative NDVI derived from compressed JPEG pixel values and do not include the possibility to include more complex aspects like soil correction. In our ICPA12 c...

Palm oil represents the most efficient oilseed crop in the world but the production of palm oil involves plantation operations in one of the most fragile environments - the tropical lowlands. Deforestation, the drying-out of swampy lowlands and chemical fertilizers lead to environmental problems that are putting pressure on this industry. Unmanned...

In recent years, unmanned airborne systems (UAS) have gained a lot of interest for their potential use in precision agriculture. While the imagery from color infrared (CIR)-enabled commercial off-the-shelf cameras onboard UAS is appealing to facilitate crop scouting, the application of quantitative spectral analyses is influenced by a range of conf...

Codium recurvatum is described from material collected on a Tanzanian reef slope. The diminutive species is easily recognized by its unusual morphology, as its thallus consists of several dorsiventrally flattened lobes originating from a central holdfast and curving back towards the substratum. DNA barcodes (rbcL exon 1 and tufA) confirm the distin...

With ecosystem services of intertidal habitats under rising pressure of human disturbance and climate change, monitoring habitat diversity is increasingly required. However, field-based surveys are time and resource-intensive and often do not provide spatially explicit information. While airborne (multi-spectral) photography and LIDAR (Laser Imagin...

In the face of global change, spatially explicit studies or meta-analyses of published species data are much needed to understand the impact of the changing environment on living organisms, for instance by modeling and mapping species’ distributional shifts. A Nature Editorial (2008) recently discussed the need for spatially explicit biological dat...

Aim : Because of their broad distribution in geographical and ecological dimensions, seaweeds (marine macroalgae) offer great potential as models for marine biogeographical inquiry and exploration of the interface between macroecology and macroevolution. This study aims to characterize evolutionary niche dynamics in the common green seaweed genus H...

Adapter from published proceedings article: Pauly K, Goossens R & De Clerck O (2011) Mapping coral-algal dynamics in a seasonal upwelling area using spaceborne high resolution sensors. Proceedings of the ESA Living Planet Symposium, ESA SPS-686, 8pp.