Recent morphodynamics of alpine lakes in Southern Carpathian Mountains using high-resolution optical imagery

Abstract

This study reveals for the first time the surface area evolution of glacial lakes in the Romanian Carpathians over 47 years. The research also advances our understanding in the potential of satellite-based remote sensing techniques to monitor geomorphologic evolution of 27 rock basins turned into glacial lakes in the Retezat Mountains, Southern Romanian Carpathians. These mountains host most of the glacial lakes in Romania, including both the widest and deepest glacial lakes. Using high-precision orthorectification and co-registration techniques, the surface area extension and reduction of 27 shallow water bodies ranging in size from 0.10 to 9.14 ha was analyzed over two time intervals (1968-2007 and 2007-2014). The total surface area increased only by 1% between 1968 and 2014, with over half of the growth occurring during the last 7 years of the study period. Analysis of the surface area extension and reduction revealed that catchment aspect, catchment size, lake elevation, landcover, topography, and lake depth are the main environmental factors controlling the present state of the glacial lakes in the central part of the Retezat Mountains. The results suggest that the different behavior of glacial lakes within the north-facing valleys compared with the evolution of the lakes settled in southern exposed valleys is mainly due to climatic and geomorphologic particularities of the opposing slopes. On the northern side the lakes are slowly decreasing due to more intense geomorphologic activity of both the erosivity of precipitations and periglacial processes (e.g., gelifraction, mass wasting, and permafrost degradation). High altitude lakes generally are increasing because of the longer duration of the ice cover and the smaller amounts of sediment yielded

Exploring the Biodiversity and Conservation Value of Alpine Grasslands in the Bucegi Massif, Romanian Carpathians

“…floristic survey. The Bucegi Conglomerate, a Cretaceous formation with significant limestone content, is the predominant rock type in the mountains [45]. The location and rugged topography strongly influence the distribution and unilateral or multiple effects of general climatic or microclimatic factors [46].…”

“…The Bucegi Massif (Figure 1), with an altitudinal range of 798 to 2505 m and annual average rainfall ranging from 177 to 1423 mm, is a particularly interesting area for the floristic survey. The Bucegi Conglomerate, a Cretaceous formation with significant limestone content, is the predominant rock type in the mountains [45]. The location and rugged topography strongly influence the distribution and unilateral or multiple effects of general climatic or microclimatic factors [46].…”

“…In the Bucegi Massif of the South-Eastern Carpathians, alpine grasslands cover a wide altitudinal range, extending from the upper mountain belt around 1600 m above sea level to the alpine belt at 2400 m [43, 44,49]. The dominant graminoid community in the lower alpine zone, where siliceous rocks prevail [45], is N. stricta, while F. rubra and S. rigida communities thrive on calcareous rocks. As we ascend to the upper alpine zone, K. myosuroides and F. violacea communities tend to dominate [4,31].…”

Remote Sensing of Surface Water Dynamics in the Context of Global Change—A Review

“…Of the studies that only monitor inter-annual dynamics, many studies investigate long Landsat time series-the longest going back to the first available scenes from Landsat 1 [70,[90][91][92][93][94][95][96]. Few studies consider even longer timeframes, all of those make use of "niche" satellite sensors that were not originally developed for EO but for espionage [27,[97][98][99][100] or historic aerial imagery [101]. These approaches typically do not consider intra-annual dynamics, as the availability of historical RS data is limited.…”

The Aspen (Populus Tremula L.) From the Southern Carpathians

“…The tallest peak (Moldoveanu Peak) is located in Făgăraş Mountains, having an altitude of 2544 m. These mountains are formed on crystalline schist rocks (predominant) and on sedimentary ones at the basis (Kuhlemann et al, 2013;Magori et al, 2017). The climate is levelled, based on altitudes so that the climate is temperate in lower areas and alpine as the altitude increases (Tóth et al, 2015;Necsoiu et al, 2016;Vincze et al, 2017) Aspen (Populus tremula L.) is a pioneer species with a rapid growth and present in temperate and boreal regions from Eurasia (figure 1).…”