Spatio-Temporal Change of Lake Water Extent in Wuhan Urban Agglomeration Based on Landsat Images from 1987 to 2015

• Published in: Remote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2017-03, Vol.9 (3), p.270
• Main Authors: Deng, Yue, Jiang, Weiguo, Tang, Zhenghong, Li, Jiahong, Lv, Jinxia, Chen, Zheng, Jia, Kai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agglomeration; Band spectra; Classification; Climate change; Environmental protection; Feature extraction; Flooding; Lakes; Landsat; Landsat satellites; random forest; Remote sensing; Resource management; Satellite imagery; Spectral bands; Urban areas; Urban development; urban lake water; Urbanization; water inundation frequency; Water resources management; Wuhan urban agglomeration
• ISSN: 2072-4292; 2072-4292
• DOI: 10.3390/rs9030270

Urban lakes play an important role in urban development and environmental protection for the Wuhan urban agglomeration. Under the impacts of urbanization and climate change, understanding urban lake-water extent dynamics is significant. However, few studies on the lake-water extent changes for the Wuhan urban agglomeration exist. This research employed 1375 seasonally continuous Landsat TM/ETM+/OLI data scenes to evaluate the lake-water extent changes from 1987 to 2015. The random forest model was used to extract water bodies based on eleven feature variables, including six remote-sensing spectral bands and five spectral indices. An accuracy assessment yielded a mean classification accuracy of 93.11%, with a standard deviation of 2.26%. The calculated results revealed the following: (1) The average maximum lake-water area of the Wuhan urban agglomeration was 2262.17 km2 from 1987 to 2002, and it decreased to 2020.78 km2 from 2005 to 2015, with a loss of 241.39 km2 (10.67%). (2) The lake-water areas of loss of Wuhan, Huanggang, Xianning, and Xiaogan cities, were 114.83 km2, 44.40 km2, 45.39 km2, and 31.18 km2, respectively, with percentages of loss of 14.30%, 11.83%, 13.16%, and 23.05%, respectively. (3) The lake-water areas in the Wuhan urban agglomeration were 226.29 km2, 322.71 km2, 460.35 km2, 400.79 km2, 535.51 km2, and 635.42 km2 under water inundation frequencies of 5%-10%, 10%-20%, 20%-40%, 40%-60%, 60%-80%, and 80%-100%, respectively. The Wuhan urban agglomeration was approved as the pilot area for national comprehensive reform, for promoting resource-saving and environmentally friendly developments. This study could be used as guidance for lake protection and water resource management.