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Land Cover Land Use Change Effects on Surface Water Quality: Integrated MODIS and SeaWiFS Assessment of the Dnieper and Don River Basins and their Reservoirs
Project Start Date
01/01/2005
Project End Date
01/01/2008
Project Call Name
Regional_Initiative_Name
Solicitation
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Team Members:

Person Name Person role on project Affiliation
Anatoly Gitelson Principal Investigator University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, United States
Geoffrey Henebry Co-Investigator Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA
Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the years of turbulent socioeconomic transition during the rest of the decade is now recognized as one of the largest and most rapid LCLUC events of the 20th century. The principal mechanism of LCLUC was the disintegration of the institutions of centralized control over the agricultural sector, without which the agricultural sector contracted sharply throughout the region. Changes in surface water quality in the wake of the collapse have been documented across Europe. This project focuses on two interrelated questions: (1) What are the significant, observable linkages between LCLUC and reservoir water quality? (2) Can reservoir water quality be effectively monitored using SeaWiFS and MODIS standard data products and new value-added products? We are evaluating the applicability of an inversion technique we developed to retrieve chlorophyll-a concentrations using reflectance spectra from turbid productive waters. We are testing these algorithms using MODIS and SeaWiFS data to monitor chlorophyll and total suspended matter concentrations in large reservoirs in Dnieper and Don River basins and in Azov Sea (Figure 1). We are also evaluating the trends in land surface vegetation. Image time series from MODIS reveal substantial regional heterogeneity in vegetation trends from 2000-2007.