Josh and Chris have recently published some work with collaborators from the Alan Turing Institute in the Journal of Open Source Software. This paper is pyveg: A Python package for analysing the time evolution of patterned vegetation using Google Earth Engine and is available online.
Periodic vegetation patters occur throughout the world in water limited systems. These patterns take the form of spots, labyrinths and gaps and undergo morphometric changes as they experience long term reductions in rainfall. This provides a useful indicator of the health of drylands. Previous efforts to evaluate these patterns have been qualitative or if quantitative, have been sporadic and have examined small scale sites. These pattern vegetation sites often occur in hard to reach locations. We developed a new way of quantitatively evaluating the state of patterned vegetation and assign a numerical value to their morphology. When applied to satellite data, this enables a long term analysis of pattern vegetation health, as well as their resilience. We have developed a python package, pyveg, which encapsulates this methodology and enables the user to perform long term pattern vegetation analysis of any site in the world.
