Spectral Reflectance Indices as Indirect Indicators of Ecological Threats

Abstract eng:
The purpose of paper presented is to demonstrate the ability of spectral reflectance indexes to indicate ecological threats connected in particular with long-term changes. High uncertainties, which are immanent to ecosystems behavior projections, require some integrated parameters to describe the ecosystem response to external impacts such as natural and technological disasters and climate connected ecological changes. The role of this type parameter may play the indexes, which describe the state of vegetation. As the threat indicators the set of satellite observed spectral indexes which were reduced to MSS, TM and ETM+ sensors of the Landsat satellites are proposed. For the case studies analyzed the vegetation indexes (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, Enhanced Vegetation Index), pigment indexes (Photochemical Reflectance Index, Structure Insensitive Pigment Index), stress index (Plant Stress Status Index), water index (Normalized Difference Water Index), and Temperature Comparative Index were used. It was shown that the analysis of temporal and spatial regional trends of indexes mentioned above as well as its inter-correlations allows to estimate the behavior of ecosystems and to forecast the corresponding change parameters. Spectral reflectance indexes were analyzed with trends of bio-productivity (net primary production) and climate parameters on test-sites of Western Ukraine and Hungary. The conclusions on ecosystem response to climate change and on long-term trends of ecological transformations of regions investigated have been obtained.

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