Beschreibung: Permafrost regions are highly sensitive to climate change. Bringing research data and metadata from diverse sources together and visualising them within a publicly available worldwide system would have an enormous impact on data accessibility and availability and would significantly promote scientific work. The CarboPerm WebGIS, a case study focusing on the Lena River Delta in the Laptev Sea Region (Siberia), shows how a WebGIS infrastructure can support scientific work, data management, data visualisation, and data publication. CarboPerm is an interdisciplinary German project with Russian cooperation, investigating the formation, turnover and release of carbon in Siberian permafrost landscapes. There, the Lena River formed the largest delta in the Arctic and is place of long-term Russian-German scientific cooperation in permafrost research. The CarboPerm WebGIS is being set up to visualise and emphasise the spatial context of local samples, measurements, and analyses versus the thematic background information (e.g., geomorphology, pedology, geology and vegetation), using the WebGIS infrastructure “maps@awi” at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). The CarboPerm WebGIS database includes historical data from long-term Russian-German cooperation and recent field campaigns as well as environmental datasets that are freely available via the internet or research data repositories.

Beschreibung: Permafrost-Landschaften reagieren sehr sensibel auf den Klimawandel. Die Synthese von Forschungsdaten und Metadaten über diese Gebiete und deren Visualisierung in einem interoperablen, weltweit zugänglichen System ist von hohem Nutzen für Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Innerhalb des Permafrost-Forschungsprojektes CarboPerm wird für das Lena- Delta und die Laptevmeer-Region ein WebGIS-Projekt entwickelt, welches die wissenschaftliche Forschertätigkeit durch Datenmanagement, Datenvisualisierung und Datenpublikation unterstützt. CarboPerm ist ein interdisziplinäres deutsch-russisches Kooperationsprojekt, das die Bildung, den Umsatz und die Freisetzung von Kohlenstoff in sibirischen Permafrost-Landschaften untersucht. Der Fluss Lena hat das größte Delta in der Arktis ausgebildet und ist gleichzeitig ein Kerngebiet langjähriger russisch-deutscher Kooperation in der Permafrost-Forschung. Das CarboPerm WebGIS wurde ins Leben gerufen, um den räumlichen Bezug von lokalen Probennahmen, Messergebnissen und Analysen mit thematischen Hintergrundinformationen, wie z.B. Geomorphologie, Pedologie, Geologie und Vegetation zu visualisieren. Die CarboPerm-WebGIS-Datenbank entstand unter Nutzung der WebGIS-Infrastruktur „maps@awi“ am Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung (AWI). Sie beinhaltet sowohl historische Daten aus der langjährigen russisch-deutschen Kooperation als auch von aktuellen Geländekampagnen, sowie umweltrelevante räumliche Datensätze, die aus öffentlich zugänglichen Datenquellen und Daten-Repositorien stammen.

Beschreibung: The dataset is composed of AisaEAGLE airborne hyperspectral imagery data acquired during the AIRMETH2016 campaign on August 27th, 2016 within the Toolik Lake Natural Research Area on the Alaskan North Slope. The Toolik Lake Research Natural Area is representative of the North Slope physiographic province of the Southern Arctic Foothills (Walker et al., 1989). Dominant vegetation types are dictated by soil moisture and geology and include moist tussock tundra, wet sedge meadows, and dry upland heaths. The dataset includes three flight lines with 130 spectral bands ranging from VIS to NIR (451.7 – 897 nm) wavelength regions. The dataset also includes Level 2A EnMAP simulated imagery using the end-to-end Simulation tool (EeteS) with 78 bands from VIS to NIR (423 – 903 mn). The overall goal of the campaign was to acquire airborne imagery over the Toolik Vegetation grid encompassing 94 permanent 1 x 1 m vegetation plots where corresponding, comprehensive multi-seasonal spectral reflectance, photosynthetic pigment, and detailed species composition data exists. The remote sensing data are highly novel and can be used for vegetation mapping of species composition, plant biomass, and photosynthetic activity.

Beschreibung: The scope of the Science Plan is to describe the scientific background, applications, and activities related to the Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program (EnMAP) mission. Primarily, the document addresses scientists and funding institutions, but it may also be of interest for environmental stakeholders and governmental bodies. It is conceived to be a living document that will be updated throughout the entire mission. Chapter 1 provides a brief overview of the principles and current state of imaging spectroscopy. This is followed by an introduction to the EnMAP mission, including its objectives and potential impact on international programs as well as major environmental and societal challenges to their understanding and management EnMAP can contribute. Chapter 2 describes the EnMAP system together with data products and access, calibration/validation issues, and synergies with other missions. Chapter 3 gives an overview of the relevance, current lines of research, and potential contributions of EnMAP for major fields of application, such as vegetation, geology and soils, coastal and inland waters, cryosphere, urban areas, atmosphere and hazards to address the environmental and societal challenges presented in Chapter 1. Finally, Chapter 4 outlines the scientific exploitation strategy, which includes the strategy for community building and training, preparatory flight campaigns and software developments. A list of abbreviations is provided in the annex to this document, while an extended glossary of terms and abbreviations is available at the EnMAP website.

Beschreibung: Coloured Dissolved Organic Matter (CDOM) is one of the major light absorbing constituents in freshwaters. Supplied from degradation of components of the aquatic environment, it consists mainly of humic substances and its concentration is strongly related to primary production, often associated to macrophytes. It plays a central role in several biological and chemical processes affecting the bioavailability of nutrients in aquatic ecosystems. Therefore CDOM can be regarded as a water quality indicator. We used the spectral absorption and spectral slope for understanding CDOM dynamics in surface reservoirs in the Brazilian semiarid region. The analysis was based on water samples collected in three reservoirs in a total of ten sampling locations in the period June 2014 to November 2015 with monthly to bi-monthly intervals totaling 120 samples. The collected water samples were filtered through cellulose acetate membrane filters. Subsequently, spectral absorbance was measured in a Lambda 950 UV-VIS spectrometer in the spectral range 250 to 800 nm using a quartz cuvette with 5 cm optical path. From the absorbance measurement, we obtained CDOM content using the specific absorption coefficient at 440nm as well as spectral slope. The average slope for the entire period for all reservoirs is 0,018, but we found a considerable increase in spectral slope values after the wet period (between February 2014 and June 2014) for the reservoirs São Nicolau and Paus Branco while Marengo reservoir showed only slight variations during this period, but exhibited an increase only in the dry period. Regarding aCDOM(440), the average was equal to 2,55 for Marengo, 5,70 for São Nicolau, and 3,53 for Paus Branco reservoir indicating different characteristics of these reservoirs.We noticed a decrease in the absorption coefficient for São Nicolau and Paus Branco reservoirs at the end of the wet period whereas for Marengo reservoir this value showed a different behavior. Spectral slope and spectral absorption seem consistent and, among other possible factors, its dynamics were affected by high evaporation and low precipitation, typical conditions for semiarid regions in the tropics. The results show also evidence of the hysteresis phenomenon related to humic substance properties. However, it is important to consider also other water quality parameters in order to assess the whole interaction occurring in the reservoirs under eutrophic conditions. This is a first study of the application of spectral absorption and spectral slope of CDOM for small reservoirs in semiarid Brazil providing additional information to the traditional water quality measurements. In the future, we plan to relate the in-situ measurements to satellite imagery to study spatio-temporal water quality dynamics and relate them to land use changes.

Beschreibung: Permafrost regions are highly sensitive to climate changes. To monitor key variables and to identify environmentally relevant-processes is of topmost importance in these environments. Beside data analysis and map creation capabilities, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) also comprise functionalities for mobile data acquisition in the field, data transfer, data monitoring, data description, as well as data sharing and publication of data as WebGIS Services (Web Map/Feature Services (WMS, WFS)). Due to their excellent usability GIS technology and services are very common in many scientific disciplines all over the world, and since most data formats are standardized data re-use and data interchangeability are guaranteed. We visualize field-derived and remote sensing derived research data, collected within Russian and German cooperation projects in the Lena River Delta, Laptev Sea Region (Siberia) on a Web GIS Platform. We visualize the locations of long-term discharge measurements and of soil sampling for organic Carbon and Nutrients. Geormorphological feature classes derived from satellite data and publicly available environmental data layers (e.g. vegetation, soils, and digital elevation models) display the broader regional and thematic context. AWI offers WebGIS services published under http://maps.awi.de/awimaps/. The WebGIS core components are ArcGIS for Server 10.3 and PostgreSQL databases 9.3 including Spatial Database Engine (SDE).

Beschreibung: The scope of this Science Plan is to describe the scientific background, applications, and activities related to the EnMAP mission. Primarily, the Science Plan addresses scientists and funding institutions, but it may also be of interest for environmental stakeholders and governmental bodies. It is conceived to be a living document that will be updated throughout the whole mission. Current global challenges call for interdisciplinary approaches. Hence, the science plan is not structured in the traditional disciplinary way. Instead, it builds on overarching research themes to which EnMAP can contribute. This Science Plan comprises the following five chapters presenting the significance, background, framework, applications, and strategy of the EnMAP mission: Chapter 2 highlights the need for EnMAP data with respect to major environmental issues and various stakeholders. This chapter states the mission’s main objectives and provides a list of research themes addressing global challenges to whose understanding and management EnMAP can contribute. Chapter 3 presents an overview of the EnMAP mission from a scientific point of view including a brief description of the mission parameters, data products and access, and calibration/validation issues. Chapter 4 provides an overview of hyperspectral remote sensing regarding its principles, development, and current state and synergies to other satellite missions. Chapter 5 describes current lines of research and EnMAP applications to address the research themes presented in Chapter 2. Finally, Chapter 6 outlines the scientific exploitation strategy, which includes the strategy for community building, dissemination of knowledge and increasing public awareness.

Beschreibung: Against the background of EnMAP preparation analyses have been carried out on the status of research in various areas of hyperspectral remote sensing for the use of existing algorithms in the EnMAP application box. The aim was to compose the status of research in Germany and internationally. Therefore, in various fields of expertise applied and accordingly available algorithms and products based on hyperspectral data has been evaluated and documented. The intention has been to demonstrate and to evaluate the added value of hyperspectral remote sensing to multispectral methods for each product. For this purpose analyses have been carried out by different research groups which were based on the specialty and the experience of each group. Hereby a summary was created of each major application perspective and the relevant remote sensing derived variables and significant processing algorithms (state-of-the-art) belonging to this context. Based on this, the research delivers, as a result, a recommendation which of the algorithms should be implemented into the Applikationsbox of EnMAP. Tests of the algorithms or their implementation were not part of the analyses. However, notes have been given on what algorithms should be tested in the context of a detailed preparation phase. An assessment to the further R & D requirements in the development of algorithms has been made on this basis.

Beschreibung: The scope of the Science Plan is to describe the scientific background, applications, and activities of the Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program (EnMAP) imaging spectroscopy mission. Primarily, this document addresses scientists and funding institutions, but it may also be of interest to environmental stakeholders and governmental agencies. It is designed to be a living document that will be updated throughout the entire mission lifetime. Chapter 1 provides a brief overview of the principles and current state of imaging spectroscopy. This is followed by an introduction to the EnMAP mission, including its objectives and impact on international programs as well as major environmental and societal challenges. Chapter 2 describes the EnMAP system together with data products and access, calibration/validation, and synergies with other missions. Chapter 3 gives an overview of the major fields of application such as vegetation and forests, geology and soils, coastal and inland waters, cryosphere, urban areas, atmosphere and hazards. Finally, Chapter 4 outlines the scientific exploitation strategy, which includes the strategy for community building and training, preparatory flight campaigns and software developments. A list of abbreviations is provided in the annex to this document and an extended glossary of terms and abbreviations is available on the EnMAP website.

Beschreibung: A systematic review and inventory of recent research relating to optical remote sensing of Arctic vegetation was conducted, and thematic and geographical trends were summarized. Research was broadly categorized into four major themes of (1) time series, including NDVI trends and shrub expansion; (2) disturbance and recovery, including tundra fires, winter warming, herbivory, permafrost disturbance, and anthropogenic change; (3) vegetation properties, including biomass, primary productivity, seasonality, phenology, and pigments; and (4) classification and mapping. Remaining challenges associated with remote sensing of Arctic vegetation were divided into three categories and discussed. The first are issues related to environmental controls including disturbance, hydrology, plant functional types, phenology and the tundra-taiga ecotone, and understanding their influence on interpretation and validation of derived remote sensing trends. The second are issues of upscaling and extrapolation related to sensor physics and the comparability of data from multiple spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions. The final category identifies more philosophical challenges surrounding the future of data accessibility, big data analysis, sharing and funding policies among major data providers such as national space agencies and private companies, as well as user groups in the public and private sectors. The review concludes that the best practices for the advancement of optical remote sensing of Arctic vegetation include (1) a continued effort to share and improve in situ-validated datasets using camera networks and small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, (2) data fusion with non-optical data, (3) sensor continuity, consistency, and comparability, and (4) free availability and increased sharing of data. These efforts are necessary to generate high quality, temporally dense datasets for identifying trends in Arctic tundra vegetation.