Monitoring the Transformation of Arctic Landscapes: Automated Shoreline Change Detection of Lakes Using Very High Resolution Imagery ...

Water bodies are a highly abundant feature of Arctic permafrost ecosystems and strongly influence their hydrology, ecology and biogeochemical cycling. While very high resolution satellite images enable detailed mapping of these water bodies, the increasing availability and abundance of this imagery...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kaiser, Soraya, Grosse, Guido, Boike, Julia, Langer, Moritz
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.18452/23366
https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/handle/18452/24015
Description
Summary:Water bodies are a highly abundant feature of Arctic permafrost ecosystems and strongly influence their hydrology, ecology and biogeochemical cycling. While very high resolution satellite images enable detailed mapping of these water bodies, the increasing availability and abundance of this imagery calls for fast, reliable and automatized monitoring. This technical work presents a largely automated and scalable workflow that removes image noise, detects water bodies, removes potential misclassifications from infrastructural features, derives lake shoreline geometries and retrieves their movement rate and direction on the basis of ortho-ready very high resolution satellite imagery from Arctic permafrost lowlands. We applied this workflow to typical Arctic lake areas on the Alaska North Slope and achieved a successful and fast detection of water bodies. We derived representative values for shoreline movement rates ranging from 0.40–0.56 m.yr−1 for lake sizes of 0.10 ha–23.04 ha. The approach also gives an ...