Remote Sensing Methods for Environmental Monitoring of Human Impact on sub-Arctic Ecosystems in Europe
The role and scale of human impact on the global environment is a question of special importance to the scientific community and the world as a whole. This impact has dramatically increased since the beginning of industrialisation, yet its understanding remains patchy. The sub-Arctic plays a central...
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| Format: | Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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Trinity
2017
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| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.14292 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/268066 |
| Summary: | The role and scale of human impact on the global environment is a question of special importance to the scientific community and the world as a whole. This impact has dramatically increased since the beginning of industrialisation, yet its understanding remains patchy. The sub-Arctic plays a central role in forming the global environment due to the vast territory of boreal forest and tundra. Severe climatic conditions make its ecosystems highly sensitive to any natural and human disturbances. In this context, the dynamics of boreal vegetation, and of the forest/tundra interface (the treeline), is the most representative indicator of environmental changes in the sub-Arctic. For some time now, monitoring land cover and vegetation changes using remote sensing techniques have been a powerful method for studying human impact on environment from landscape to global scales. It is particularly efficient when applied to the sub-Arctic ecosystems. Remote sensing gives access to accurate and specific information about distant and hard-to-reach areas across forest and tundra. Despite all the e orts, there is a lack of uniformity in studying human impact, a shortage of mapping of impact over large territories and a lack of understanding of the relation between human activity and environmental response. This dissertation develops a systematic approach to monitoring land cover and vegetation changes under human impact over northern Fennoscandia. The study area extends north and south of the treeline and covers around 400,000km2 reaching from Finnmark in Norway, through Norrbotten in Sweden, Lapland in Finland up to the Murmansk region in Russia. This is the most populated and industrially developed region of the whole sub-Arctic and, therefore, suffering most from human impact. This dissertation identifies industrial atmospheric pollution, reindeer herding, forest logging, forest fires and infrastructure development as the primary types of human impact close to the treeline. For each type characteristic hotspots are identified ... |
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