Investigating Metal-Induced Vegetation Stress with Landsat ETM+ Satellite Images

Abstract

Remote sensing technology is used in many areas today, facilitating spatial analysis operations under difficult conditions. This technology offers solutions in different fields such as forest degradation, land classification, change analysis and mine detection. In particular, mine detection is of great importance for the economies of countries. Detecting mines with terrestrial measurement techniques in vegetated areas is a challenging situation, but mine sites can be easily detected, by using satellite images in a shorter time. When plants are exposed to heavy metals, anomalies occur and they cause reduction in the amount of chlorophyll. This can be observed as decrease in the reflectance values. In this study, it is aimed to detect the stress of the plants due to heavy metal by measuring the amount of the change in the reflectance values of plants in mining area and non-mining area. In this context, VIGS index is exploited on Landsat ETM+ satellite images belong to Cukuralan/Izmir and Kisladag/Usak regions for both gold mine and non-gold mine areas. Other vegetation indices (NDVI, GNDVI, BNDVI) were also computed on these sites when they were covered with vegetation. According to the evaluation results, it was seen that the difference between the values of the VIGS and NDVI indexes in the mine and not mine areas were higher, and therefore it was suggested that they could be used to determine the amount of anomaly in the wooded areas.