Analysis of Lake Shrinkage across the Tibetan Plateau Using Remote Sensing Technology

Tibetan Plateau is a typical study area of global environment change, and lake is an important ecological factor to reveal ecoenvironment evolution. Thus, monitoring the succession law of lakes on Tibetan Plateau is of great significance to global environment change research. Because of the harsh environment and low accessibility of the plateau, most of the existing methods are always time-consuming but with low efficiency. This paper presents a combined method based on remote sensing technology that contains both the high-precise extraction of modern lake and paleo shoreline, which uses multi-level spatial scale transformation mechanism of “whole-local” to achieve gradually approach of modern lakes’ optimal edges by setting up an iterative algorithm based on the computation of NDWI first, and then detects and recovers paleo shorelines by judging the elevation difference using fusion data of LANDSAT ETM+ image and SRTM. By comparing the extent of modern lake and paleo shoreline, result of lake shrinkage can be discovered clearly and in time.