Evaluation Of Changes And Instability Of Water Content Using Remote Sensing Methods In A Nature Conservation Area

Abstract

The most significant landscape forming factors in the Great Hungarian Plain are humans and water. Before the regulation of the waterways one quarter of the present-day territory of Hungary belonged to the complex network of periodically or permanently inundated flood plains, marshes and swamps. Owing to human activities and the climatic changes observed in the last decades, processes that indicate landscape change have occurred in the Great Hungarian Plain (Rakonczai J. 2007). Loss of wetlands is a major process of landscape change. Evaluation of geographical changes caused primarily by water shortage is a difficult task as on the one hand only a limited data set is available and, on the other hand all the processes taking place in the area have to be known and understood in order to recognize the exact change. Habitats are extremely changeable and after the early summer floods, sometimes they entirely dry up to the end of the season. For detection and accurate evaluation of the long term changes lasting from the 19th century to present days the spatial and temporal development of instability has to be revealed. This has been determined on the basis of a series of high time resolution satellite images by digital image processing methods for the geographically very interesting period 1999-2003.