Investigation of heavy metals distribution in suspended matter and macrophytes of the Selenga river delta using airborne hyperspectral remote sensing

The Leman-Baikal project is an international Swiss-Russian research initiative in the fields of physical limnology, geochemistry and hydrology of aquatic geosystems. The main methodological principle of the project is constituted by simultaneous collection of airborne wide-area Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) and ground point-based data. In this study we used supervised classification of hyperspectral images to interpret three types of aquatic species: small yellow pond lily, reed and pondweeds with watermilfoil. For turbidity mapping we used mosaic hyperspectral image (band 534 nm) to derive Total Suspended Matter (TSM). A good level of correlation between reflectance values and TSM concentrations were observed.