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

• Main Authors: Kaiser, Soraya, Grosse, Guido, Boike, Julia, Langer, Moritz
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 2021
• Subjects: change detection; shoreline movement rate; arctic water bodies; permafrost lowlands; automated monitoring; North Slope; very high resolution imagery; 910 Geografie und Reisen; Alaska North Slope; north slope; permafrost; Alaska
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.18452/23366; https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/handle/18452/24015

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 ...