Monitoring Long-Term Land Cover Transformations in the Danube Delta using Landsat Satellite Imagery

The STARS4Water project addresses the critical need to understand the impacts of climate change and anthropogenic activities on freshwater availability and ecosystem resilience at the river basin scale. By developing innovative data services and models tailored to stakeholder needs, the project will improve decision-making processes for sustainable water resource management. A distinctive feature of STARS4Water is its focus on co-creating solutions with local stakeholders using a living lab approach, ensuring that newly developed tools remain relevant and usable beyond the life of the project.

 

This extension of the original project—funded with a special grant from Unitatea Executivă pentru Finanțarea Învățământului Superior, a Cercetării, Dezvoltării și Inovării (UEFISCDI) from Romania—focuses on a detailed change detection analysis to monitor and quantify land cover transformations in the emblematic Danube Delta region. The objective is to assess how environmental and anthropogenic changes have influenced this ecologically significant wetland over several decades. To achieve this, a comprehensive database of multispectral satellite images from the Landsat archive, spanning from 1985 to 2023, will be constructed. The long-term dataset enables a detailed temporal analysis, important for detecting land cover dynamics over time.

 

The methodology involves several key phases: (1) data collection and preprocessing of Landsat satellite images to correct errors and align imagery for consistent comparative analysis; (2) sampling and training a deep learning model using convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, to classify various land cover types; (3) performing land cover classification on the processed images using the trained model, followed by accuracy assessment; and (4) conducting a comprehensive change detection analysis to quantify and interpret the observed transformations in land use and land cover.

 

The results of this analysis will deliver important knowledge on the long-term dynamics of the Danube Delta landscape, highlighting critical changes with implications for biodiversity, water management and ecosystem services. This approach will support adaptive ecosystem management and contribute to the scientific understanding of climate-related and anthropogenic changes in fragile wetland ecosystems.

 

Acknowlegments

This work was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS/CCCDI - UEFISCDI, project number PN-IV-P8-8.1-PRE-HE-ORG-2023-0094, within PNCDI IV.