Monitoring the Water Stress of an Indoor Living Wall System Using the “Triangle Method”

• Main Authors: Xu Yuan, Kati Laakso, Chad Daniel Davis, J. Antonio Guzmán Q., Qinglin Meng, Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-06-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: living wall; triangle method; remote sensing; temperature; NDVI
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/11/3261

Living walls are important vertical greening systems with modular prevegetated structures. Studies have suggested that living walls have many social benefits as an ecological engineering technique with notable potential for reconciliation ecology. Despite these benefits, there are currently no mature workflows or technologies for monitoring the health status and water stress of living wall systems. To partially fill the current knowledge gap related to water stress, we acquired thermal, multispectral, and hyperspectral remote sensing data from an indoor living wall in the Cloud Forest of the Gardens by the Bay, Singapore. The surface temperature (Ts) and a normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) were obtained from these data to construct a Ts-NDVI space for applying the “triangle method”. A simple and effective algorithm was proposed to determine the dry and wet edges, the key components of the said method. The pixels associated with the dry and wet edges were then selected and highlighted to directly display the areas under water-stress conditions. Our results suggest that the proposed algorithm can provide a reasonable overview of the water-stress information of the living wall; therefore, our method can be simple and effective to monitor the health status of a living wall. Furthermore, our work confirms that the triangle method can be transferred from the outdoors to an indoor environment.