Monitoring extreme environmental conditions in wetland macrosystems using optical and RADAR satellite data.
Presentación Oral – 8th INTECOL Wetland Conference. 2008, Cuiabá, Brasil.
It has been widely recognized the importance of wetland macrosystem in South América from biogeochemical and biodiversity point of view. Despite the large volume of satellite observations available, the potential of satellite techniques to analyze temporal and spatial dynamics of these wetlands has not yet been fully assessed.
The Paraná river Delta is a wetland macrosystem that stretches through the final 300 km of the Paraná basin and covers approximately 17,500 km2. The region includes a complex mosaic of landscapes resulting from past and present fluvial and coastal hydrogeomorphological process. It also has a complex hydrological regime mainly determined by the influence of the Paraná and Uruguay rivers, De La Plata estuary tidal regime and local rain.
We assess the capability of ENVISAT ASAR WSM HH (C-band) multitemporal set of images to map environmental conditions occurred during last year. Five images were acquired on the Paraná Delta from September 2005 to May 2008.
The extent of the latest large flooding event occurred in the region during summer-autumn 2007 was identified. On the other hand extreme drought conditions occurred during summer-autumn 2008 was evident through the monitoring of open water lagoons in the region.
For this, we performed a change detection based on the image difference procedure, and image segmentation. Results have been evaluated considering the water level records at different ports. The potential of C band SAR images for monitoring water presence and water level under vegetation coverage in this type of macrosystem is discussed.