Long-term spatiotemporal analysis of lake surface water area changes in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia (SEA) contains the largest number of lakes that are crucial for providing essential ecosystem services for human society, such as water supply, agriculture, tourism, and recreation. SEA region has a strong climate with frequent and severe natural disasters. Both direct and indirect factors, such as anthropogenic activities and climate variability and change, have had an impact on lake surface water. Mapping surface water over time provides the explicit data essential for understanding the relative impacts of climate variability and changes and human activities. This research aims to monitor a change in surface water areas of lakes in SEA by delineating and analyzing high spatial resolution of satellite images in time series.

The primary tools used in the methodology for tracking and delineating the surface water areas over the timescale are Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing technology. The map generalization methods were applied to ensure the consistency of the data. The results demonstrate high-resolution data with an estimation of the surface water area for each lake. The map reveals the surface water dynamic changes over the region, which is essential for understanding the relative impacts on the surface water of lakes in SEA.