Deutsch Intern
Earth Observation Research Cluster

Deltas

  • Subject:  Socio-ecological systems in Deltas
  • Study site: Amazonas (Brazil)
  • financing:  Belmont Forum

The DELTAS project (http://delta.umn.edu/) brings together experts from the physical and social sciences with local stakeholders from government and non-profit organizations to

(1) advance the sustainability science of deltas as critical coupled human-natural systems undergoing change,

(2) co-design, co-develop, and co-deliver a science-based delta sustainability framework for risk assessment and decision support,

(3) build an international repository of integrated datasets on deltas, and

(4) demonstrate the merits of the developed modeling and decision support framework by implementing them in selected deltas (Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna, Mekong, and Amazon) in partnership with local stakeholders.

DELTAS is a Belmont Forum initiative (https://igfagcr.org/) and is coordinated by the Department of Civil Engineering of the University of Minnesota. The Remote Sensing Department of the University of Wuerzburg is a partner in the DELTAS project and contributes with information derived from remote sensing data. Among other products high spatial resolution (30m) land use/land cover (LULC) change information will be generated based on multi-seasonal and multi-temporal Landsat data. For this purpose a large amount of Landsat imagery has to be analyzed and automatic processing chains need to be development. Figure 1 shows two monthly composites (02/2014 and 03/2014) of the Ganges-Brahmaputra river delta. For these two images 79 (37 and 42) Landsat scenes have been processed in an automatic processing chain including atmospheric correction, cloud/cloud shadow masking, spectral index calculation and compositing. Further work concentrates on the derivation of suitable (multi-temporal and spatial) metrics for the LULC classification and the LULC change analysis.