Presented by Dr Tim McVicar, CSIRO Land and Water on Wednesday 28 June 2017.
This presentation will report on the completion of the FWPA co-funded project entitled Remote sensing of land-use-specific actual evapotranspiration of entire catchments containing plantations (project PNC286-1112).
Being able to accurately measure how much water is used by all land-uses, including plantations, is vital for the forest industry to lead an ‘evidence-based’ informed debate about forestry water use.
Such research can help state and federal regulators to understand the nuances and complexities of ‘normal’ water use across catchments containing multiple land-uses.
In this FWPA co-funded project, researchers from CSIRO determined water-usage across two large study sites that include forestry plantations in NSW and the Green Triangle region of Victoria and South Australia. The researchers “blended” low frequency/high resolution Landsat data with high frequency/low resolution MODIS data.
The “blended” high frequency/high resolution satellite data was used as input to an algorithm that accurately estimated actual evapotranspiration (AET) across the study sites for all land-uses.
Tim leads the Time Series Remote Sensing team within the Environmental Earth Observation group of the Environmental Sensing, Prediction and Reporting theme of CSIRO Land and Water.
He is a spatial eco-hydrologist with over 19 years research experience in the use of time series remote sensing linked with spatio-temporal interpolation methods and analysis technologies to model and monitor regional eco-hydrological processes.
