The German-Ukrainian project "Ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) to climate change and regional sustainable development by empowerment of Ukrainian Biosphere Reserves" is funded by the International Climate Initiative (IKI) which is part of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU).
The project aims at integrating an EbA-informed approach to national and regional planning and action in Ukraine, leading to better adapted land-use and wide-ranging sustainable development. The expected outcome of the project is to empower three biosphere reserves in three different ecoregions – Roztochya, Shatzkyi and Desnianskyi, – for becoming role models that catalyze the introduction of a new type of participatory and adaptive ecosystem management in the wider landscape.
Land Surface Temperature (LST) is an essential variable to observe short time and longtime changes of climate on a regional scale. Additionally, it allows studying the individual reaction of different land cover types to these changes in climate, as a result of a changed surface energy budget.
The LST can be obtained by remote sensing data, analyzing the infrared and near-infrared bands. The following analysis is based on two different data sets: For a long time period (2002-2018) from MODIS with a coarse spatial resolution of 1000m and a short time period (2013-2018) Landsat8 2013-2018 with a high spatial resolution of 30m. MODIS data is available on a daily basis, whereas Landsat8 data is only available on a fortnightly basis, which drastically limits the number of images.
Averaged LST and the corresponding standard deviation is available for seasons and different temperature ranges.
To avoid short time influence of weather, additionally, normalization with the spatial mean was done. Values below 1 indicate areas which are cooler than the spatial mean and values above 1 areas which are hotter than the average.
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