Detecting and Quantifying a Massive Invasion of Floating Aquatic Plants in the Río de la Plata Turbid Waters Using High Spatial Resolution Ocean Color Imagery
1
Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires C1428EGA, Argentina
2
Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio (IAFE), CONICET-Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires C1428EGA, Argentina
3
Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), Operational Directorate Natural Environment, 1200 Brussels, Belgium
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(7), 1140; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10071140
Received: 20 May 2018 / Revised: 6 July 2018 / Accepted: 16 July 2018 / Published: 19 July 2018
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Remote Sensing in Coastal Zone Monitoring and Management—How Can Remote Sensing Challenge the Broad Spectrum of Temporal and Spatial Scales in Coastal Zone Dynamic?)
The massive development of floating plants in floodplain lakes and wetlands in the upper Middle Paraná river in the La Plata basin is environmentally and socioeconomically important. Every year aquatic plant detachments drift downstream arriving in small amounts to the Río de la Plata, but huge temporary invasions have been observed every 10 or 15 years associated to massive floods. From late December 2015, heavy rains driven by a strong El Niño increased river levels, provoking a large temporary invasion of aquatic plants from January to May 2016. This event caused significant disruption of human activities via clogging of drinking water intakes in the estuary, blocking of ports and marinas and introducing dangerous animals from faraway wetlands into the city. In this study, we developed a scheme to map floating vegetation in turbid waters using high-resolution imagery, like Sentinel-2/SMI (MultiSpectral Imager), Landsat-8/OLI (Operational Land Imager), and Aqua/MODIS (MODerate resolution Imager Spectroradiometer)-250 m. A combination of the Floating Algal Index (that make use of the strong signal in the NIR part of the spectrum), plus conditions set on the RED band (to avoid misclassifying highly turbid waters) and on the CIE La*b* color space coordinates (to confirm the visually “green” pixels as floating vegetation) were used. A time-series of multisensor high resolution imagery was analyzed to study the temporal variability, covered area and distribution of the unusual floating macroalgae invasion that started in January 2016 in the Río de la Plata estuary.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
floating vegetation; turbid water; Río de la Plata; aquatic macrophytes; Sentinel-2; Landsat-8; Aqua
▼
Show Figures
Graphical abstract
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Dogliotti, A.I.; Gossn, J.I.; Vanhellemont, Q.; Ruddick, K.G. Detecting and Quantifying a Massive Invasion of Floating Aquatic Plants in the Río de la Plata Turbid Waters Using High Spatial Resolution Ocean Color Imagery. Remote Sens. 2018, 10, 1140.
Show more citation formats
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
