Monitoring Wetlands in Southern Iraq Based on Landsat Data

The wetlands in southern Iraq, known as the Mesopotamian Marshes, are an important element of the continental ecosystem that requires a simple and reliable observation system. The purpose of the work is to evaluate two methods of satellite monitoring of the restoration of water surface and wetland vegetation after their drainage in 1990–2002 and re-flooding since 2003. We analyzed multispectral Landsat images from 1990, 2000, 2013, and 2020 taken in June just after the end of Tigris River high water. These images were used in supervised landscape classification of barren soils, water surfaces, and vegetation landscapes. Our analysis revealed that marshes and temporarily flooded areas have increased markedly and bare soils are slowly shrinking. The landscape areas, which were automatically classified by the NDVI thresholds from 2013 to 2020, differ from the corresponding areas of supervised classification, but both methods returned similar indicators of the average area of marshes, making up 60–70% of their baseline area in the 1970s. Further studies are needed to delineate the Mesopotamian Marshes landscapes and to determine the evolution of land surface processes.