License: The code in this repository is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Digital Earth Australia data is licensed under the Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 license.
Contact: If you need assistance with any of the Jupyter Notebooks or Python code in this repository, please post a question on the Open Data Cube Slack channel. If you would like to report an issue with this repo, or suggest feature requests, you can open an issue on this repository. Non-technical questions about Digital Earth Australia Waterbodies can be sent to dea@ga.gov.au.
Citing Digital Earth Australia Waterbodies:
Krause, Claire E.; Newey, Vanessa; Alger, Matthew J.; Lymburner, Leo. 2021. "Mapping and Monitoring the Multi-Decadal Dynamics of Australia’s Open Waterbodies Using Landsat" Remote Sens. 13, no. 8: 1437. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13081437
Up to date information about the extent and location of surface water provides all Australians with a common understanding of this valuable and increasingly scarce resource. Water detection algorithms are now being routinely applied to continental and global archives of satellite imagery. However, water resource management decisions typically take place at the waterbody rather than pixel scale.
This repository presents a workflow for generating polygons of persistent waterbodies from Landsat observations, enabling improved monitoring and management of water assets across Australia. We use Digital Earth Australia’s (DEA) Water Observations from Space (WOfS) water classifier, which provides a water classified output for every available Landsat scene, to determine the spatial locations and extents of waterbodies across Australia. DEA Waterbodies uses Geoscience Australia’s archive of over 30 years of Landsat satellite imagery to identify where almost 300,000 waterbodies are in the Australian landscape.
Digital Earth Australia Waterbodies workflow
Each polygon was then used to generate a time series of WOfS, providing a history of the change in the wet surface area of each waterbody every ~16 days since 1987.
Digital Earth Australia Waterbodies. Waterbody polygons mapped by this product are shown in blue. There are almost 300,000 across Australia.
DEA Waterbodies supports users to understand and manage water across Australia. DEA Waterbodies provides new insights into local through to national-scale surface water spatio-temporal dynamics by enabling the monitoring of important landscape features such as lakes and dams, improving our ability to use earth observation data to make meaningful decisions. It can be used to gain insights into the severity and spatial distribution of drought, or identify potential water sources for aerial firefighting during bushfires.
For more information about the DEA Waterbodies product, including instructions for accessing the product, frequently asked questions and data download links, see the Digital Earth Australia website.
DEA Waterbodies has some requirements which can be installed with pip:
pip install --extra-index-url="https://packages.dea.ga.gov.au" -r requirements.txtOnce you have installed the requirements for DEA Waterbodies, install the module locally:
pip install -e .This command installs an editable version of the module in the current location.
A command line interface is available for generating wet area time series for a given shapefile. You can call the help for this interface from the command line using:
waterbodies-ts --help