College of Agriculture & Natural Resources
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1598
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Post-Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Monitoring of Louisiana Salt Marshes Using Landsat Imagery(MDPI, 2017-06-01) Mo, Yu; Kearney, Michael S.; Riter, J. C. AlexisThe Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the second largest marine oil spill in history, contaminated over a thousand kilometers of coastline in the Louisiana salt marshes and seriously threatened this valuable ecosystem. Measuring the impacts of the oil spill over the large and complex coast calls for the application of remote sensing techniques. This study develops a method for post-Deepwater Horizon oil spill monitoring of the damaged marsh vegetation using Landsat imagery. This study utilizes 10 years of Landsat data, from 2005 to 2014, to examine the longevity of the oil spill’s impacts on the marsh vegetation. AVIRIS data collected between 2010 and 2012 are used to validate the Landsat results. Landsat imagery documents the significant effect of oiling on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) of the marsh vegetation in 2010 and 2011 (p < 0.01 in both cases). These results are corroborated by the AVIRIS data, which recorded the most severe impact in May 2011 followed by progressive recovery in October 2011 and October 2012. The Landsat imagery, combined with relevant environmental information and appropriate statistical tools, provides a robust and low-cost method for long-term post-oil spill monitoring of the marshes, revealing that the major aboveground impacts (at 30 m scale) of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on Louisiana salt marshes lasted for two years. The method presented is applicable for other hazardous events whenever pre-event referencing and long-term post-event monitoring are desired, thereby offering an effective and economical tool for disaster management.Item Loss of Coastal Wetlands in Lake Burullus, Egypt: A GIS and Remote-Sensing Study(MDPI, 2022-04-21) Keshta, Amr E.; Riter, J. C. Alexis; Shaltout, Kamal H.; Baldwin, Andrew H.; Kearney, Michael; Sharaf El-Din, Ahmed; Eid, Ebrahem M.Lake Burullus is the second largest lake at the northern edge of the Nile Delta, Egypt, and has been recognized as an internationally significant wetland that provides a habitat for migrating birds, fish, herpetofauna, and mammals. However, the lake is experiencing severe human impacts including drainage and conversion to agricultural lands and fish farms. The primary goal of this study was to use multispectral, moderate-spatial-resolution (30 m2) Landsat satellite imagery to assess marsh loss in Lake Burullus, Egypt, in the last 35 years (1985–2020). Iterative Self-Organizing Data Analyses (ISODATA) unsupervised techniques were applied to the Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager–Thermal Infrared Sensor (OLI–TIRS) satellite images for classification of the Lake Burullus area into four main land-use classes: water, marsh, unvegetated land surfaces (roads, paths, sand sheets and dunes), and agricultural lands and fish farms. The overall classification accuracy was estimated to be 96% and the Kappa index was 0.95. Our results indicated that there is a substantial loss (44.8% loss) in the marsh aerial coverage between 1985 and 2020. The drainage and conversion of wetlands into agricultural lands and/or fish farms is concentrated primarily in the western and southern part of the lake where the surface area of the agricultural lands and/or fish farms doubled (103.2% increase) between 2000 and 2020. We recommend that land-use-policy makers and environmental government agencies raise public awareness among the local communities of Lake Burullus of the economic and environmental consequences of the alarming loss of marshland, which will likely have adverse effects on water quality and cause a reduction in the invaluable wetland-ecosystem services.Item Loss of Coastal Wetlands in Lake Burullus, Egypt: A GIS and Remote-Sensing Study(MDPI, 2022-04-21) Keshta, Amr E.; Riter, J. C. Alexis; Shaltout, Kamal H.; Baldwin, Andrew H.; Kearney, Michael; El-Din, Ahmed Sharaf; Eid, Ebrahem M.Lake Burullus is the second largest lake at the northern edge of the Nile Delta, Egypt, and has been recognized as an internationally significant wetland that provides a habitat for migrating birds, fish, herpetofauna, and mammals. However, the lake is experiencing severe human impacts including drainage and conversion to agricultural lands and fish farms. The primary goal of this study was to use multispectral, moderate-spatial-resolution (30 m2) Landsat satellite imagery to assess marsh loss in Lake Burullus, Egypt, in the last 35 years (1985–2020). Iterative Self-Organizing Data Analyses (ISODATA) unsupervised techniques were applied to the Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager–Thermal Infrared Sensor (OLI–TIRS) satellite images for classification of the Lake Burullus area into four main land-use classes: water, marsh, unvegetated land surfaces (roads, paths, sand sheets and dunes), and agricultural lands and fish farms. The overall classification accuracy was estimated to be 96% and the Kappa index was 0.95. Our results indicated that there is a substantial loss (44.8% loss) in the marsh aerial coverage between 1985 and 2020. The drainage and conversion of wetlands into agricultural lands and/or fish farms is concentrated primarily in the western and southern part of the lake where the surface area of the agricultural lands and/or fish farms doubled (103.2% increase) between 2000 and 2020. We recommend that land-use-policy makers and environmental government agencies raise public awareness among the local communities of Lake Burullus of the economic and environmental consequences of the alarming loss of marshland, which will likely have adverse effects on water quality and cause a reduction in the invaluable wetland-ecosystem services.