Medium-Sized Lake Water Quality Parameters Retrieval Using Multispectral UAV Image and Machine Learning Algorithms: A Case Study of the Yuandang Lake, China

Water quality monitoring of medium-sized inland water is important for water environment protection given the large number of small-to-medium size water bodies in China. A case study was conducted on Yuandang Lake in the Yangtze Delta region, with a surface area of 13 km². This study proposed utilising a multispectral uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) to collect large-scale data and retrieve multiple water quality parameters using machine learning algorithms. An alternate processing method is proposed to process large and repetitive lake surface images for mapping the water quality data to the image. Machine learning regression methods (Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Backpropagation Neural Network, and Convolutional Neural Network) were used to construct separate water quality inversion models for ten water parameters. The results showed that several water quality parameters (COD_Mn, temperature, pH, DO, and NC) can be retrieved with reasonable accuracy (R² = 0.77, 0.75, 0.73, 0.67, and 0.64, respectively), although others (NH₃-N, BGA, TP, Turbidity, and Chl-a) have a determination coefficient (R²) less than 0.6. This work demonstrated the tremendous potential of employing multispectral data in conjunction with machine learning algorithms to retrieve multiple water quality parameters for monitoring medium-sized bodies of water.