Hyperspectral Detection of a Subsurface CO 2 Leak in the Presence of Water Stressed Vegetation
Remote sensing of vegetation stress has been posed as a possible large area monitoring tool for surface CO 2 leakage from geologic carbon sequestration (GCS) sites since vegetation is adversely affected by elevated CO 2 levels in soil. However, the extent to which remote sensing could be used for CO 2 leak detection depends on the spectral separability of the plant stress signal caused by various factors, including elevated soil CO 2 and water stress. This distinction is crucial to determining the seasonality and appropriateness of remote GCS site monitoring. A greenhouse experiment tested the degree to which plants stressed by elevated soil CO2 could be distinguished from plants that were water stressed. A randomized block design assigned Alfalfa plants (Medicago sativa) to one of four possible treatment groups: 1) a CO 2 injection group; 2) a water stress group; 3) an interaction group that was subjected to both water stress and CO 2 injection; or 4) a group that received adequate water and no CO 2 injection. Single date classification trees were developed to identify individual spectral bands that were significant in distinguishing between CO 2 and water stress agents, in addition to a random forest classifier that was used to further understand and validate predictive accuracies. Overall peak classification accuracy was 90% (Kappa of 0.87) for the classification tree analysis and 83% (Kappa of 0.77) for the random forest classifier, demonstrating that vegetation stressed from an underground CO 2 leak could be accurately discerned from healthy vegetation and areas of cooccurring water stressed vegetation at certain times. Plants appear to hit a stress threshold, however, that would render detection of a CO 2 leak unlikely during severe drought conditions. Our findings suggest that early detection of a CO 2 leak with an aerial or ground-based hyperspectral imaging system is possible and could be an important GCS monitoring tool.