Abstract
Climate and regional land-use and landcover change (LUCC) impact the ecosystem of the Upper Rhine Area (URA) and transform large parts of the landscape into strongly irrigated agricultural cropland. The increase of long-term drought periods and the trend towards low summer precipitation totals trigger an increase in groundwater scarcity and amplify the negative effects of extensive irrigation purposes and freshwater consumption in a hydrologically sensitive region in Central Europe. This article presents qualitative transnational open source remote sensing temporal series of vegetation indices (NDVI) and groundwater level development to tracing near real-time vegetation change and socio-ecological feedbacks during periods of climate extremes in the Upper Rhine Area (2018–2020). Increased freshwater consumption caused a dramatic drop in groundwater availability, which eventually led to a strong degradation of the vegetation canopy and caused governmental regulations in July 2020. Assessing vegetation growth behavior and linking groundwater reactions in the URA through open source satellite data contributes to a rapidly accessible understanding of the ecosystem’s feedbacks on the local to the transnational scale and further enables risk management and eco-political regulations in current and future decision-making processes.
Highlights
Land-use and Land Cover change (LUCC) impact the earth’s surface in manifold social, spatial, and temporal perspectives [1,2,3,4]
This paper presents the linkages between LUCC, irrigation strategies, and monoculture crop cultivation and their interrelations with hydrological sensitivity under climate extremes in the transnational context of the Upper Rhine river system (Figure 1) using digital surface data, Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery, and environmental attributes such as regional groundwater fluctuations, precipitation measures, land-use, and agricultural datasets
Spatio-temporal variability in crop production in the Upper Rhine Area (URA) was monitored through time series active vegetation canopy
Summary
Land-use and Land Cover change (LUCC) impact the earth’s surface in manifold social, spatial, and temporal perspectives [1,2,3,4]. There are various factors, constraints, and interrelations of a degrading environment related to LUCC activities like rising urbanization, forest degradation, loss of wetlands, agricultural intensification, desertification, irrigation, and climatic change, often summarized as global change. Publications/soer-2020 (2015), last accessed 3 August 2020) further states that LUCC and intensification threaten soil and water ecosystem services and drive biodiversity losses. Water Framework Directive (2000) and the Groundwater Directive (2006) introduced a holistic approach towards international regulations Concepts like Land Degradation Neutrality are strongly related to this (https://www.unccd.int/actions/achieving-land-degradation-neutrality, last accessed 3 August 2020)
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