The objective is to determine the environmental degradation caused by war in Bosnia-Herzegovina from March 1992 to September 1994, through remote sensing change detection techniques.
Throughout history, the environment has been a victim in warfare. Two major sources of environmental degradation can be referred to again and again-the incidental results of weapons and maneuver, and the direct results of attempting to deny resources to the enemy. Few natural disasters come close to the environmental damage caused by modern warfare.
Prior to September 11, 2001, the most recent war in which the U.S. involved itself occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The war in Bosnia occurred between March 1992 and November 1995. With the United States role in world affairs, our participation in NATO, and the increasing use of the United States Military in a peace keeping, it is important to realize the significance that our environmental systems play on a nations recovery. When reading The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia, there is no reference made to the recovery of the natural environment. In the references found, little or no discussion of the environment was listed as important to a nation's war recovery. This project will help demonstrate the usefulness of remote sensing in monitoring environmental degradation caused by war, and the usefulness of GIS to portray the environmental status of an area before, and after war's devastation.
The study area for this project is located in northeastern Bosnia. The total extent of the study area is flanked by Serbia to the east, Croatia to the North, and the remainder of Bosnia to the South and West. South of Bosnia is Montenegro and to the West is the Adriatic Sea. The area covers approximately 4800 square miles. It represents a range of land uses typical of the region, notably forests, mixed farming and pastures. The northern portion of the study area consists of mountains below 1000 feet with many large open valleys, while the south is typically rugged mountains as high as 3000 feet. The climate consists of hot summers and cold winters; areas of high elevation have short, cool summers and long, severe winters. The primary natural resources of the region are coal, iron, bauxite, manganese, forests, copper, chromium, lead, and zinc.
The goal of this environmental monitoring project is to categorize the environmental damage caused directly and indirectly by the civil war in Bosnia. The main purpose of the project will be to produce two products:
1. Classification map of North East Bosnia using defined categories of environmental damage using remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
2. Map the known minefields of MND-North using GIS.
We will use change detection procedures to determine potential areas of environmental degradation. Change detection involves the use of multitemporal data sets to discriminate areas of land cover change between dates of imaging.
After data acquisition, the project will proceed in three major stages. The initial database-building step will be the most time consuming phase of the project. It will involve establishing the spatial extent of the study area, deciding on an appropriate working projection, and assembling the various spatial data to be used for the study in digital form. The second step is to manipulate the data to extract and derive those spatial patterns that indicate environmental degradation, such as deforestation, water pollution, and land cleared due to bombing. The change detection will occur between two anniversary dates. The images used for the study are a Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper, dated 5 September 1991 and 14 September 1994. Ideally the study should take place between September 1991, which is five months prior to the war in Bosnia, and September 1995, which is at the final period of the war, however images for 1995 are not available beyond March. A large part of this phase will be image interpretation and classification. The objective of this operation is to replace visual analysis of the image data with quantitative techniques for automating the identification of features in scenes based on spectral and spatial patterns.
The third step will be to combine the derived evidence to predict where environmental degradation has occurred. This will be carried out in stages, with the final product being a predictive map showing the likely areas of environmental damage caused by war. This will include a minefield layer, which for this study will be considered environmental degradation for inherent reasons.
The final process for the project will be to produce a comprehensive report on the procedures and findings of the project.
Curtis Edson :
cbedson@students.wisc.edu
Yeon Yeu : yeu@cae.wisc.edu