NUBiP ecologists are working with NASA

    For a long time, the US National Aerospace Agency (NASA) has been implementing an important environmental program “Land Cover / Land Use Change”. As a part of this program, annual workshops (SCERIN) for scientists involved in aerospace research of landscape changes caused by economic activity and natural processes take place in Eastern Europe. Such meetings aim at experience exchange and introduction of new scientific methods. They are held alternately in different countries. And Ukraine can host such a workshop in 2021, after Greece in 2020 (tentatively, in Lviv).

    Professor of the Department of General Ecology and Life Safety of NUBiP of Ukraine, Volodymyr Starodubtsev actively participates in the implementation of this program. He presents the results of his environmental research, which use space imagery obtained from NASA archives, as well as drones. These include the study of the formation of new landscapes in the Dnipro reservoirs, monitoring of landscape changes in the river deltas of the Black Sea basin, and unique studies of the spatial heterogeneity of land productivity in forest-steppe. In 2017, Professor Starodubtsev suggested to include a new section in the program - “Water Management and Land Cover”. As the author of this idea, he was entrusted to be the head of this section.

    This year the workshop was held in Novi Sad, Serbia, at the Faculty of Research of the local university. The workshop was attended by scientists from the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Georgia, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Greece, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary and the United States. The American delegation was headed by NASA Manager Dr. Garrick Gutman. The presentations and discussions were conducted in four sections: monitoring of the state of forests, changes in land cover, effectiveness of the research network in Eastern Europe, and water management and its environmental impact. Volodymyr Starodubtsev delivered the presentation on “Reservoirs as the driving force of land cover changes in river basins” and presented a poster on “Landscape changes in the river deltas of the Black Sea basin".

   The workshop ended with an interesting excursion, devoted to the nature, history and culture of Serbia. We look forward to the arrival of European scientists and American coordinators to Ukraine.

Volodymyr Bogolyubov,
Head of the Department of General Ecology
and Life Safety