Cyanobacterial Blooms as an Indicator of Environmental Degradation in Waters and Their Monitoring Using Satellite Remote Sensing

Abstract

Cyanobacterial bloom is a major problem in many lakes and rivers around the world even now in the twenty-first century. It has detrimental effects not only on the aquatic environment such as reduced transparency, elevated pH, and oxygen depletion but also on the drinking, agricultural, industrial, commercial, and recreational uses of inland waters. In this chapter, we first review the influence of the harmful cyanobacterial blooms on aquatic fauna and flora such as zooplankton, fish, and aquatic macrophyte. And then we introduce the monitoring of the cyanobacterial bloom using satellite remote sensing. Satellite remote sensing could present a valuable tool to obtain more reliable information about the extent of the cyanobacterial bloom than the conventional monitoring methods such as ship survey. With the rapid development of satellite sensors, many useful algorisms have been proposed by scientists. As one of the methods, we introduce a novel method for monitoring the abundance of the cyanobacterial bloom from Landsat images using an environmental indicator, namely, the visual cyanobacteria index (VCI).