Abstract
Abstract. Wetlands protection has been a constitutive part of the conservation strategies that the Chilean Forest Service has implemented in the Protected Wild Areas of Chile. These ecosystems are highly vulnerable to changes in their hydrological regime, generating direct effects on the biodiversity associated with them. These changes may be related to the rainfall regime, however, the activities of drainage, overgrazing, landfill, or tributary deviation are the greatest threats that these ecosystems face today. For years, long-term satellite information was dismissed in the Chilean public service due to the lack of technical, computational or software capabilities. Nowadays, cloud computing tools with massive geodata analysis have democratized remote sensing, giving way to the development of web applications and online information analysis platforms. An interactive web application was developed in Google Earth Engine (GEE) that uses spectral indexes correlated with the presence of water, generating estimates in “almost real time” on Landsat and Sentinel-2 images. The Surface Water Satellite Monitoring Platform allows the automatic processing through the internet of the images available for the analyzed wetlands, overcoming the time and computational capacity restrictions required with conventional geomatics programs. This has allowed to support the management of these ecosystems, reducing the costs of field work and increasing the efficiency in the monitoring of wetlands in the Protected Wild Areas of Chile.
Highlights
Wetlands offer a wide variety of ecosystem services and provide habitat for many species of high ecological value (Ahumada et al 2011)
That is why its management has been a constitutive part of the conservation strategies that the Chilean Forest Service has implemented in the National System of Protected Areas of the State (SNASPE)
Google Earth Engine (GEE)'s online Integrated Development Environment (IDE) delivers interactivity to time series graphs, since when passing over some point of the series, the date of the image is shown, and when clicking on a particular point, the corresponding image will be displayed on the left panel along with the surface water detection vector
Summary
Wetlands offer a wide variety of ecosystem services and provide habitat for many species of high ecological value (Ahumada et al 2011). The monitoring of wetlands is still a challenge, since they can be highly fluctuating ecosystems in the extension of their surface water, so we can find wetlands with permanent waters throughout the year, to lands that remain dry for several months (Muro et al 2016) Understanding this dynamic is very important for the maintenance of the structure and functioning of the ecosystem, since it is the main physical, chemical and biotic regulator of these ecosystems. The use of spectral indexes correlated with the presence of water, allow surface estimates using optimized thresholds, providing a useful way for their study, it is necessary to use mass image processing algorithms in order to reconstruct and understand their hydroperiod or temporal variability In this sense, today the tools of "Cloud Computing" such as Google Earth Engine (GEE), have managed to overcome a series of inconveniences of time and computing capabilities that facilitate the processing and analysis of large amounts of satellite images. As in 2017, the SNASPE Monitoring and Information Section has begun to generate a series of tools in the GEE platform, which aim to support decision-making and management in SNASPE, using standard and scalable methodologies at the level of the entire protected areas system
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