Vegetation cover monitoring in the water protection areas of Vienna’s spring water mains
Abstract
The City of Vienna owns and manages an area of about 33.000 ha in the watersheds of the First and the Second Spring Water Mains in the massifs of Rax-Schneeberg-Schneealpe and Hochschwab. About half of the protection and conservation area is covered by production forest. These mountain forests merge into a mosaic of inaccessible protection forest, mountain pine (Pinus mugo subsp. mugo), willow (Salix sp.), alpine meadows, and rocks. In these areas is not possible to monitor vegetation cover changes with standard forest monitoring methods, and detailed field surveys and mapping activities would be too expensive. Therefore, in this project a remote sensing based monitoring system using aerial images and orthophotos is developed. The key features describing the vegetation cover are collected by means of image interpretation in a sampling-based approach. The monitoring system has to be designed in such a way that changes of the vegetation cover (i.e. degradation as well as emergence of forest) can be observed and analysed regularly in a standardized way and technically as simple as possible. Both up-to-date and historic imagery of the Rax-Schneeberg- Schneealpe massif are used to test the monitoring system and to highlight areas that show significant changes and thus require special care.
keywords monitoring image interpretation degradation water supply Vienna
Publikationen
Project staff
Clement Atzberger
Univ.Prof. Dr.rer.nat. Clement Atzberger
clement.atzberger@boku.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 47654-85711
Project Leader
03.04.2017 - 30.06.2017