Extracting ecological information from oblique angle terrestrial landscape photographs: Performance evaluation of the WSL Monoplotting Tool

While aerial photography and satellite imagery are the usual data sources used in remote sensing, land based oblique photographs can also be used to measure ecological change. By using such historical photographs, the time frame for change detection can be extended into the late 1800s and early 1900s, predating the era of aerial imagery by decades. Recent advancements in computing power have enabled the development of techniques for georeferencing oblique angle photographs. The WSL Monoplotting Tool is a new piece of software that opens the door to analyzing such photographs by allowing for extraction of spatially referenced vector data from oblique photographs. A very large repeat photography collection based on the world's largest systematic collection of historical mountain topographic survey images, the Mountain Legacy Project, contains >6000 high resolution oblique image pairs showing landscape changes in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta between ca. 1900 – today. We used a subset of photographs from this collection to assess the accuracy and utility of the WSL Monoplotting Tool for georeferencing oblique photographs and measuring landscape change. We determined that the tool georeferenced objects to within less than 15 m of their real world 3D spatial location, and the displacement of the geographic center of over 121 control points was less than 3 m from the real world spatial location. Most of the error in individual object placement was due to the angle of viewing incidence with the ground (i.e., low angle/highly oblique angles resulted in greater horizontal error). Simple rules of control point selection are proposed to reduce georeferencing errors. We further demonstrate a method by which raster data can be rapidly extracted from an image pair to measure changes in vegetation cover over time. This new process permits the rapid evaluation of a large number of images to facilitate landscape scale analysis of oblique imagery.