Ecosystem vigilance: leveraging NDVI analysis and Deep Learning for
sustainable plant health management in Ziarat and Sherani districts,
Balochistan, Pakistan
Abstract
In the Baluchistan province of Pakistan, Ziarat and Sherani districts
hold significant economic potential for plant cultivation, yet they face
severe environmental challenges, including illegal tree cutting, forest
fires, and plant diseases. The first part of our comprehensive study,
using advanced technology like Landsat 8–9 Operational Land Imager
(OLI) imagery from 2013 and 2022 and the Normalized Difference
Vegetation Index (NDVI) has revealed alarming statistics: 99% of the
vegetation land cover consists of dead plants, 97% are categorized as
unhealthy, and very healthy plants are extinct. Projections indicate
that moderately healthy plants will disappear in 3 years in Sherani and
6 years in Ziarat. The second part of our study focuses on early disease
detection, especially for exotic tree species like olive as Ziarat and
Sherani districts are rich in exotic tree species such as pine nut,
juniper, and wild olive. We utilized advanced deep-learning techniques
and a dataset comprising 5,334 olive leaf images, including those
affected by Aculus Olearius and Olive Peacock Spot diseases, in addition
to healthy leaves. Innovative transfer learning models such as Inception
V3, Inception Resnet V2, MobileNet, and Convolutional Neural Networks
(CNN) have been applied to enhance disease identification accuracy. The
results highlight the promise of these technologies in early disease
detection, with MobileNet demonstrating exceptional performance by
reducing execution time through the strategic use of fewer training
epochs, achieving a 99% accuracy rate for binary classification and
97.6% for multiclass classification, along with the highest F1 score of
99.4. These findings underscore the urgent need to preserve plant
health, protect vegetation, and safeguard species, highlighting the
importance of biodiversity and forest conservation in critical regions.
Keywords: Environmental challenges, Vegetation health, Disease
detection, Deep learning models, Biodiversity conservation