Following the flow: a combined remote sensing-GIS approach to model exposure of marine ecosystems to riverine flood plumes  

Authors / CoAuthors

Álvarez-Romero, J.G. | Devlin, M. | Texeira da Silva, E. | Petus, C. | Kool, J.

Abstract

Increased loads of land-based pollutants associated with land use change are a major threat to coastal-marine ecosystems globally. Identifying the affected areas and the scale of influence on marine ecosystems is critical to assess the ecological impacts of degraded water quality and to inform planning for catchment management and marine conservation. Studies using remotely-sensed data have contributed to our understanding of the occurrence and extent of influence of river plumes, as well as to assess exposure of ecosystems to river-borne pollutants. However, refinement of plume modelling techniques is required to improve risk assessments. We developed a novel approach to model exposure of coastal-marine ecosystems to river-borne pollutants. The model is based on supervised classification of true-colour satellite imagery to map the extent of plumes and to qualitatively assess the dispersal of pollutants in plumes. We use the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) to test our approach. We combined frequency of plume occurrence with spatially-distributed loads (based on a cost-distance function) to create maps of exposure to suspended sediment and dissolved inorganic nitrogen. We then compared annual exposure maps (2007-2011) to assess inter-annual variability in the exposure of coral reefs and seagrass beds. Our findings indicate that classification of true colour satellite images is useful to map plumes and to qualitatively assess exposure to river-borne pollutants. This approach should be considered complementary to remote sensing methods based on ocean colour products used to characterise surface water in plumes. The proposed exposure model is useful to study the spatial and temporal variation in exposure of coastal-marine ecosystems to riverine plumes. Observed inter-annual variation in exposure of habitats to pollutants stresses the need to incorporate the temporal component in exposure and risk models.

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nonGeographicDataset

eCat Id

74655

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• External PublicationScientific Journal Paper

( Theme )

• sedimentology

( Theme )

• remote sensing

( Theme )

• marine

Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC)

• Earth Sciences

• Published_Internal

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2012-09-07T00:00:00

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence    

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