Detection and Assessment of Abiotic Stress of Coniferous Landscapes Caused by Uranium Mining (Using Multitemporal High Resolution Landsat Data)

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Remote sensing have become one of decisive technologies for detection and assessment of abiotic stress situations, such as snowstorms, forest fires, drought, frost, technogenic pollution etc. Present work is aiming at detection and assessment of abiotic stress of coniferous landscapes caused by uranium mining using high resolution satellite data from Landsat. To achieve the aim, ground-based geochemical data and were coupled with the satellite data for two periods, i.e. prior and after uranium mining decommissioning, into a file geodatabase in ArcGIS/ArcInfo 9.2, where spatial analyses were carried out. As a result, weak and very weak relationships were found between the factor of technogenic pollution -Z c and vegetation indices NDVI, NDWI, MSAVI, TVI, and VCI. The TVI performs better compared to other indices in terms of separability among classes, whereas the NDVI and VCI correlate well than other indices with Z c .