This project commenced in November 2012 and is intended to provide satellite data and related scientific services to support the Murray-Darling Basin Authority's monitoring of how the condition of riparian vegetation responds to changing river run-off and wetland inundation levels.
Under this project, Geoscience Australia started to build a satellite data processing infrastructure; named the 'datacube', as a proof of concept for expected on-going time series analysis applications including historical flood and bathymetry mapping.
The work incorporates an automated processing chain for Landsat satellite images from Geoscience Australia's extensive archive, into customised high level intermediate products, including automated ortho-rectification, atmospheric correction, cloud-removal, and mosaicking, and finally into statistics on the spectral and derivative indices (that is, vegetation condition indices or various types) for the summer periods of December-March, each year for the period 2000-2013.
These vegetation indices and associate statistics are then used, by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and its collaborators, as inputs to a mathematical model of vegetation types and their respective conditions within the Murray-Darling Basin.