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Application of New Technology in Water Mapping and Change Analysis

A special issue of Water (ISSN 2073-4441). This special issue belongs to the section "New Sensors, New Technologies and Machine Learning in Water Sciences".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 December 2024) | Viewed by 964

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Interests: remote sensing; water mapping; wetland mapping; change analysis; machine learning; classification; google earth engine; landsat; sentinel
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
School of Geography and Environmental Science, Henan University, Kaifeng 475000, China
Interests: remote sensing cloud computing; water resources dynamics; terrestrial water storage; artificial water bodies; sustainable development

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Water resources are essential for human societies, environments, and various species. Water systems, including lakes, rivers, ponds, groundwater, wetlands, glaciers, etc., are being stressed and modified by both natural and anthropogenic drivers. Droughts affect the availability of water resources. Floods alter the water systems and cause economic losses. Moreover, continuous global population growth stresses water systems due to its increasing water demand for drinking and sanitation, crop irrigation, and energy production. It is critical to map current water resources, detect changes in water systems, and analyze the driving factors behind these changes.

Thanks to advancements in satellite imagery (Landsat, Sentinel, MODIS, GRACE, NAIP, RADARSAT, etc.) and cutting-edge algorithms (machine learning, deep learning, cloud computing, etc.), scientists can now map and monitor water resources and their changes with a much greater accuracy, providing valuable insights for water resource management.

This Special Issue aims to compile research concerning various aspects of mapping and the change analysis of water resources. Potential research topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Developing methods for mapping and monitoring the surface water extent and volume using different remote sensing data (e.g., optical, SAR, LiDAR, GRACE, UAV) to assess water availability.
  • Utilizing machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to analyze large volumes of remote sensing data and extract meaningful information about water bodies.
  • Investigating the relationship between extreme weather events (floods, droughts) and water body dynamics using remote sensing data and precipitation estimates.
  • Combining remote sensing data with ground-based measurements (e.g., water quality sensors, water level gauges) to develop robust and validated water monitoring systems.
  • Developing algorithms to detect and map water pollutants (e.g., algal blooms, oil spills, and sediment loads) using satellite imagery (e.g., Landsat, Sentinel, MODIS) and spectral analyses.
  • Monitoring glacier retreat and snowpack changes over time using remote sensing data to understand the impact of climate change on freshwater resources.

Dr. Zhenhua Zou
Dr. Yan Zhou
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • water extent
  • water volume
  • water quality
  • groundwater
  • mapping
  • change analysis
  • drought
  • flood
  • remote sensing
  • big data
  • machine learning
  • deep learning
  • advanced computing

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

23 pages, 6327 KiB  
Article
Detecting the Lake Area Seasonal Variations in the Tibetan Plateau from Multi-Sensor Satellite Data Using Deep Learning
by Xingyu Chen, Xiuyu Zhang, Changwei Zhuang and Xibang Hu
Water 2025, 17(1), 68; https://doi.org/10.3390/w17010068 - 30 Dec 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 648
Abstract
Monitoring lake area changes with a higher spatial and temporal resolution can facilitate a more detailed analysis of climate-related changes in the Tibetan Plateau. In the Landsat era, optical remote sensing observation with water body index-based methods mainly contributed to alpine lake investigation. [...] Read more.
Monitoring lake area changes with a higher spatial and temporal resolution can facilitate a more detailed analysis of climate-related changes in the Tibetan Plateau. In the Landsat era, optical remote sensing observation with water body index-based methods mainly contributed to alpine lake investigation. However, monitoring the seasonal or monthly change of a lake area is challenging since optical data are easily contaminated by the high cloud cover in the Tibetan Plateau. To cope with this, we generated new time series datasets including Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and the Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) observations. Meanwhile, we presented an improved deep learning model with spatial and channel attention mechanisms. Based on these datasets, we compared several deep learning models and found that the CloudNet+ had better performance. Taking this architecture as a baseline, we added spatial and channel attention mechanisms to generate our AttCloudNet+ for extracting the lake area. The results revealed that AttCloudNet+ had a better performance compared with the CloudNet+ and other CNNs (e.g., DeepLabv3+, UNet). For the accuracy of the lakeshore prediction, results from AttCloudNet+ demonstrated closer distance to the truth-value than other models. The obtained mean RMSE and MAE were 21.6 and 16.6 m, respectively. In contrast, the mean RMSE and MAE of the DeepLabv3+ were 99.5 and 76.0 m, while the corresponding RMSE and MAE for UNet were 91.1 and 64.9 m. In addition, we found our AttCloudNet+ was more robust than UNet and DeepLabv3+ because AttCloudNet+ is less influenced by the input optical images compared with DeepLabv3+ and UNet. By combining the results from different seasons and satellite sensors, we are capable of generating the complete lake area seasonal dynamics of the 15 largest lakes. The mean correlation coefficient (R2) between our seasonal lake area time series and the water level of LEGOS is 0.81, which is much better than the previous study (0.25). This indicates that our method can be used to monitor lake area seasonal variation, which is important for understanding regional climate change in the Tibetan Plateau and other similar areas. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of New Technology in Water Mapping and Change Analysis)
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