Space-based monitoring of wetlands in support of sustainable water resource and land management
Michael Riffler, Christina Ludwig, Norman Kiesslich, Christian Tottrup, Andreas Walli
Wetlands are amongst the planet‘s most productive ecosystems providing a wealth of ecosystem services, e.g., nutrition, flood control and protection, or support of biodiversity, to name a few. Nevertheless, wetlands are exposed to multiple threats due to climate change, agricultural pressure, hydrological modifications, fragmentations, etc. Conversion for agriculture, for instance, has led to the immediate loss of most biodiversity values and often to an uncompensated loss in ecological services. This poses an enormous challenge for the management of wetland resources as the growing population increasingly resorts to unsustainable use of wetlands for their livelihoods, which negatively impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem health and functions and provision of ecosystem services. To support wetland conservation, integrated water and sustainable land management from local to national level, we developed a spatial-based monitoring capacity building on satellite Earth Observation. The highly innovative and operational product to automatically detect, map and derive temporal information on wetland dynamics builds on data from the Sentinel missions complemented with historical Landsat data. The methods are currently implemented through three different large-scale application projects (cf. table on the right), mainly to support decision makers in developing countries.
Event: Land Governance in an Interconnected World_Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty_2018
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