Lake Victoria aquatic weeds monitoring by high spatial and spectral resolution satellite imagery

Aquatic weeds in lakes can cause different problems both to lake ecology and food webs and interfere with human activities. This drove our interest to exploit recursive satellite imagery to retrieve optical parameters suitable to develop an early warning strategy by mapping the aquatic weeds. This paper aims at assessing the capability of satellite-based remotely sensed imagery to provide information suitable for monitoring and managing the Lake Victoria resources. The spectral data collected during a field campaign, carried out for that purpose, were used to map the floating aquatic vegetation. By analyzing the ¿in situ¿ measurements and time series of satellite data we retrieved the distribution of aquatic weeds from 2004 to 2007 and the seasonal aquatic vegetation growth. These maps, when provided with an appropriate time frequency, can be useful to identify the preconditions for the occurrence of hazard events such as aquatic weeds and to develop an up-to-date decision support system.