Green Space Assessment and Management in Biscay Province, Spain using Remote Sensing Technology

Abstract

Our ecosystem, particularly forest lands, contains huge amounts of carbon storage in the world today. This study estimated the above ground biomass and carbon stock in the green space of Bilbao Spain using remote sensing technology. Landsat ETM+ and OLI satellite images for year 1999, 2009 and 2019 were used to assess its land use land cover (LULC), change detection, spectral indices and model biomass based on linear regression. The result of the LULC showed that there was an increase in forest vegetation by 12.5% from 1999 to 2009 and a further increase by 2.3% in 2019. However, plantation cover had decreased by 3.5% from 1999–2009; while wetlands had also decreased by 9% within the same period. There was, however, an increase in plantation cover from 2009 to 2019 by 2.1% but a further decrease in wetlands of 4.3%. Further results revealed a positive correlation across the three decades between the widely used Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) with other spectral indices such as Enhance Vegetation Index (EVI) and Normalized Differential Moisture Index (NDMI) for biomass were: for 1999 EVI (R2 = 0.1826), NDMI (R2 = 0.0117), for 2009 EVI (R2 = 0.2192), NDMI (R2 = 0.3322), for 2019EVI (R2 = 0.1258), NDMI (R2 = 0.8148). A reduction in the total carbon stock from 14,221.94 megatons in 1999 to 10,342.44 megatons 2019 was observed. This study concluded that there has been a reduction in the amount of carbon which the Biscay Forest can sequester.