Satellite Based Monitoring of Natural Heritage Sites: The Case Study of the Iguazu Park

Up to nowadays, satellite data have become increasingly available, thus offering a low cost or even free of charge unique tool, with a great potential for operational monitoring of vegetation cover, quantitative assessment of urban expansion and urban sprawl, as well as for monitoring of land use changes and soil consumption. This growing observational capacity has also highlighted the need for research efforts aimed at exploring the potential offered by data processing methods and algorithms, in order to exploit as much as possible this invaluable space-based data source. The work herein presented concerns an application study on the monitoring of vegetation cover with the use of multi-temporal (2010-2014) satellite Modis data. The selected test site is the Iguazu park highly significant, being it one of the most threatened global conservation priorities (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/303/). In order to produce synthetic maps of the investigated areas to monitor the status of vegetation and ongoing subtle changes, satellite data were processed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Results from our investigations pointed out an ongoing degradation trend.