International Journal of Sustainable Development &

World Ecology

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tsdw20

Water, water, but not everywhere: analysis of

shrinking water bodies using open access satellite
data

Sachit Mahajan & Jenny Martinez

To cite this article: Sachit Mahajan & Jenny Martinez (2020): Water, water, but not everywhere:
analysis of shrinking water bodies using open access satellite data, International Journal of
Sustainable Development & World Ecology, DOI: 10.1080/13504509.2020.1851803

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13504509.2020.1851803

Published online: 26 Nov 2020.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT & WORLD ECOLOGY
https://doi.org/10.1080/13504509.2020.1851803

Water, water, but not everywhere: analysis of shrinking water bodies using
open access satellite data
a b
Sachit Mahajan and Jenny Martinez
a
Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK;; bDepartment of Computer and Decision Sciences, Universidad
Nacional de Colombia, Antioquia, Colombia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The importance of water cannot be overstated. Not only it is essential for life, it is a vital Received 27 September 2020
resource for sustainable development. Water resource management is pivotal to ensure water Accepted 11 November 2020
security and sustainability. Having such water monitoring resources is challenging, especially in KEYWORDS
less developed countries that have limited resources. With the advancement in technology and Surface water; open data;
availability of open-access satellite data, there are opportunities to reinforce the abilities of sustainability; satellite data;
researchers and decision-makers to monitor and identify changes in water resources. In this decision making
work, we describe an easy to implement workflow for estimation of surface area of waterbodies
using open-access data from Sentinel-2 satellites. The method uses Normalized Difference
Water Index (NDWI) for surface water detection that is used to estimate the surface area of the
waterbody and analyse changes over a period of time. We develop four case studies based on
waterbodies in Spain, Morocco, and India to highlight how satellite imaging can effectively
help in estimating and visualizing the changes in water surface area. Temperature and rainfall
data are analysed to understand the impact of climate change on water resources due to
increase in temperature and changes in precipitation patterns. The proposed method is
validated by testing it on four additional lakes and comparing the results with publicly available
data. We show how open-access satellite data can potentially be used for regular monitoring of
waterbodies as well as filling the knowledge gap to assist in decision making at both local and
regional levels.

1. Introduction accessible to the regulatory bodies but can be easily

With the growing threat of global warming and climate
change, there has been an increase in the number of
extreme precipitation events all over the world. In
addition to that, rapid urbanization and population
growth have also put more world waterbodies under
extreme stress (Vörösmarty et al. 2000). Water manage­
ment is a key feature of a balanced ecosystem and it
has also been promoted by United Nations (UN)
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 that discusses
about water and its sustainable management as a key
for developing sustainable communities (Sørup et al.
2020). It is also critical for addressing other SDGs like
SDG 2 which is related to food security and SDG 3
which is related to public health. Understanding
water stress and building resilience to water scarcity
requires a good understanding of waterbodies (Stead
2014), demography and resources at regional and local
levels. Technological innovations and the availability of
open access data can be considered as a potential
solution for achieving sustainable development goals
(Anadon et al. 2016). This can lead to development of
knowledge-sharing platforms that are not only
understood and implemented by people.
Technological advancements have made it possible
to easily monitor environment at a wider geographical
level like air quality monitoring (Mahajan 2018), water
quality monitoring (Nasirudin et al. 2011), urban sus­
tainable transportation (Ahlgren et al. 2016) and insect
classification (Huang et al. 2018). That has led to devel­
opment of data-driven applications (Mahajan et al.
2018, 2019; Duran-Rodas et al. 2019) and open tools
to bridge the gap between the researchers and com­
munity members (Juang et al. 2019; Mahajan et al.
2020). Satellite imagery has been used as a feasible
and reliable method, and an alternative to in situ mon­
itoring (Yigit Avdan et al. 2019).
Remote sensing satellites are capable of monitoring
changes and are widely used in applications related to
land cover change analysis (Stow et al. 2004; Wang
et al. 2009), water-level monitoring (Crétaux et al.
2011; Taravat et al. 2016), air quality monitoring
(Hutchison 2003) and disaster management (Gitas
et al. 2008; Bello and Aina 2014). Satellite images are
a valuable source of data for understanding atmo­
spheric and environmental variations.
Programmes like Copernicus and Landsat satellite pro­
gramme provide easy access to Earth’s surface images.

CONTACT Sachit Mahajan sachitmahajan90@gmail.com

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 S. MAHAJAN AND J. MARTINEZ
The data sets are easy to access and can be retrieved
by using services like EarthData or Sentinel Hub
(Militino et al. 2020). The increase in the numbers of
high-resolution satellites and access to the data pro­
vides unprecedented opportunities to monitor the
changes in the earth’s environment. Data obtained
from remote sensing satellites can be considered as
a cost-effective method (Geyman and Maloof 2019) for
estimating the surface area of the waterbody that not
only helps in monitoring the change in the waterbody
but can also help in quantification of water storage of
lakes and reservoirs (Schwatke et al. 2019).
It has been observed that surface areas of waterbo­
dies are sensitive to environmental changes and can be
considered as a source of understanding the gradual
change in the earth’s eco-system (Mason et al. 1994; Zhu
et al. 2014). Satellite data have been widely used for the
analysis of water-level variations (Taravat et al. 2016). For
water quality assessment, the algorithms usually use
visible and infrared parts of the spectrum (Yigit Avdan
et al. 2019). There have been several water mapping
methods proposed over the years. The spectral water
index-based method has been considered a reliable and
cost-effective solution (Ryu et al. 2002). Among others,
the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI)
(McFeeters 1996) is considered to be an effective solu­
tion that uses the green and Near Infrared (NIR) bands of
satellite images. In (Birkett 1995), the author successfully
implemented satellite radar altimetry to derive lake level
changes. In (Nhu et al. 2020), the authors used space-
borne remote sensing and GIS techniques to evaluate
the changes in water level of Lake Urmia. The authors
analysed the Landsat imagery, temperature and preci­
pitation data to understand the relation between envir­
onmental factors and decreasing water levels. Machine
learning has also been widely used for predicting water
levels of lakes where the authors have used neural net­
works and genetic algorithms (Kisi et al. 2015; Khan et al.
2016). In a recent work (Park et al. 2020), the authors
proposed a water-level estimation method combining
Sentinel–1 Synthetic Aperture Radar observations and
Shuttle Radar Topography Mission surface models. The
method was tested and validated on six reservoirs using
the altimetry data as the ground truth. The authors in
(Chipman 2019) demonstrated how satellite imaging
data could be used for monitoring lake surface areas,
water levels, and volume for lakes in southern Egypt.
The authors also highlighted how the proposed method
could potentially be used for other lakes and reservoirs
that have experienced a decline in water levels due to
evaporation.
The access and use of high-resolution satellite data
are already lowering the information barrier and open­
ing up possibilities of technological innovation to pro­
vide useful information to a wider audience.
Nevertheless, there are certain challenges that still
need to be addressed like data reliability, accuracy of
water-level estimation methods (Sieck et al. 2007) and
accessibility of information at grassroots level. In many
areas; particularly in developing and underdeveloped
countries, water-level monitoring networks are often
sparse and under-equipped. This directly impacts the
decision-making process that could lead to severe con­
sequences. In this work, we discuss how remote sensed
satellite data can be integrated into creating an efficient
framework for monitoring waterbodies. We aim to add
a sociological aspect to remote sensing where we have
described how open access data and tools can be used
to efficiently extract water surfaces. To the best of our
knowledge, there are limited works (Kämpgen et al.
2014; Chalh et al. 2015; Buytaert et al. 2016) that have
discussed the use of open or linked data for water
resource management. Big data and technological
advances are facilitating water resource sustainability
in some parts of the world (Zhao and An 2018), but
that also opens up questions like how can we ”rethink”
water resource management in areas with limited data
and ground-level monitoring resources. In this work, we
leverage open data to enhance water resilience, specifi­
cally focusing on the areas that are struggling with
water sustainability issues. As compared to traditional
in-situ monitoring, we propose a cost-efficient open
data-based approach that can be potentially be used
to understand the change in water level by estimating
the surface area with water, that could potentially com­
plement the traditional monitoring methods. The sys­
tem exploits the high-resolution frequently updated
satellite data and open access tools (Aleksandrov et al.
2018) to design solution for analysis and estimation of
surface area of waterbodies. Extraction of waterbodies
and estimation of surface area is important as it offers
the insight into environmental and human effects on
waterbodies that can be essential for computing the
change in the surface area as well as applications like
flood monitoring. A workflow for waterbody surface
area estimation and analysis based on NDWI is imple­
mented and evaluated using four case studies.
Validation is performed by applying the proposed
method on four lakes in Texas, USA, and then compar­
ing the estimated percentage surface area of lakes with
the reference data. The results of the studies are used to
understand the complex patterns from the spatio-
temporal satellite data. The results give an insight into
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT & WORLD ECOLOGY
how the reservoirs have changed over the years and
provide an opportunity to potentially utilize these
insights for awareness, decision making, and promoting
better data-informed governance. The method can be
applied to other global water resources to understand
and analyse the change in the water levels. The work­
flow is easy to implement and can be used by experts as
well as non-experts to analyse historical data and under­
stand the change in water levels.
2. Materials and methods
2.1. Study area
In this work, we have considered four waterbodies
around different parts of the world, namely: Spain,
Morocco and India. Figure 1 shows the indicative loca­
tions of the four waterbodies. These waterbodies are
selected due to the availability of open-access satellite
data. Other important reasons behind selecting these
waterbodies are the emerging sustainability issues1
related to these waterbodies that have adversely
affected the water ecosystem and are leading to
potential threats like decrease in he water supply to
the region, reduction in vegetation and hydrological
imbalance.
Buendia reservoir
Buendia reservoir (Embalse de Buendia in Spanish) is
a reservoir in Spain and is located between the pro­
vinces of Cuenca and Guadalajara. Buendia dam has
been active since 1957 and has a capacity of
1,638.7 million m3. It is a major supplier of water to
cities like Madrid. Also, it is one of the major sources for
hydroelectricity production and caters to the needs of
people in nearby towns. Increase in surface
Figure 1. Indicative locations of the four water bodies: (a) Buendia reservoir, (b) Al Massira reservoir, (c) Osman Sagar lake and (d)
Thippagondanahalli reservoir.
3
temperature and regular draught conditions have
adversely affected the dam.
Al Massira reservoir
Al Massira reservoir is located in Settat province of
Morocco and is built on Oum Er-Rbia river. It is
Morocco’s second largest reservoir and supplies
water to many big cities including the capital
Casablanca. Marrakesh, one of the biggest cities in
Morocco also relies on Al Massira reservoir for its
water needs. It is also responsible for supplying water
for agricultural use around the area. The reservoir has
a capacity of 2,760,000 m3. The maximal depth of the
reservoir is 40 m and the length is 30 km (Atelghazi
et al. 2019). Over the years, Al Massira reservoir has
been a center of attention due to the adverse effects of
climate change and increase in the water demand.
Osman Sagar lake
Osman Sagar lake is located in the city of Hyderabad,
India, and is one of the main sources of water for
residents of Hyderabad. It was created in 1920 by
damming the Musi river. The area of the lake is around
46 km2 and the reservoir is 29 km2. It has a capacity of
110 million m3. It is not only an important source of
water, but also a famous tourist spot. With the growth
in urbanization and less rainfall, the reservoir is under
threat (Ramachandraiah and Prasad et al. 2004).
Thippagondanahalli reservoir
Thippagondanahalli reservoir is located in the city of
Bengaluru, India; a city of over 12 million people. The
reservoir is at the confluence of the Arkavathy and
Kumudavathi rivers. It is one of the main sources of
drinking water for people in western Bengaluru.
Constructed in 1935, the reservoir has a storage capa­
city of 95 million m3. Over the past twenty years, the
water level at reservoir has continuously decreased. As
4 S. MAHAJAN AND J. MARTINEZ
per the records,2 the last time the reservoir was full was
in 1988. With the growth in urban development in
Bengaluru and increase in water demand, the reservoir
water level has continued to decline leading to major
sustainability concerns (Liu et al. 2019).
2.2. Data
In this work, we have used imagery data obtained from
Sentinel-2 satellites. Sentinel-2 is a high-resolution,
multispectral imaging mission by European Space
Agency (ESA). The satellites sample 13 spectral bands.
Out of those, four bands at 10 m, six bands at 20 m and
three bands at 60 m spatial resolution.3 Sentinel-2
satellites have sensors that can detect reflected light
from Earth’s surface. It includes not only visible red,
green and blue (RGB) bands but also NIR and Short
Wave Infrared (SWIR). The data can be easily accessed
by using the tool called Sentinel Hub (https://www.
sentinel-hub.com/). In this work, the Level-2A (L2A)
product of Sentinel-2 is used. The L2A data is atmo­
spherically corrected. We considered the data available
between 1 April 2018 and 1 April 2020. The time period
was kept consistent for all waterbodies but number of
observation points were different for different water­
bodies based on the availability of satellite data with
low cloud cover. High cloud cover affects the imaging
performance of satellite sensors as they are not able to
penetrate the cloud that impairs their ability to provide
accurate data (Marshall et al. 1993). Figure 2 shows an
example of Al Massira reservoir on different days with
different cloud cover. It can be seen that when the
cloud cover is higher, it is impossible to accurately
estimate the geometry of the waterbody. This obstruc­
tion can adversely affect the accuracy of the algorithm.
The higher the cloud cover, the higher are the chances
of wrong estimation of water levels. Therefore, in this
work we discard the images with cloud cover greater
than 5%. Table 1 shows the available samples for all
four waterbodies after images with higher cloud cover
were filtered.
The geometries of the waterbodies are obtained by
using BlueDot Water Observatory API that provides all
the satellite observations using a RESTful API. The
BlueDot Water Observatory is a service that uses
Copernicus satellite imagery to provide historical and
current information about water levels of waterbodies
like lakes, dams, reservoirs, etc. It is a cost-effective tool
Figure 2. Different frames of satellite image of Al Massira reservoir with different cloud cover.
for obtaining and analysing water-level data (Zupanc
et al. 2019). The original shape files of the waterbodies
are obtained using the OpenStreetMaps. Data from
Land Viewer Earth Observing System4 (EOS) can also
be used to compare the water detection results. Land
Viewer provides free and easy access to the data
archives of Landsat 8, Sentinel-2, Sentinel-1 and
MODIS. It is a simple to use interface where the user
can simply input the dates and access the data from
multiple satellites.
Additionally, temperature and rainfall data are ana­
lysed to understand if there was any relationship
between the change in water levels, temperature and
rainfall. Monthly average temperature and rainfall data
are considered for Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Marrakesh
and Madrid. The data are considered for the time
period between April 2018 and March 2020. The data
is accessed using Weather API from World Weather
Online.5
2.3. Method
Water-level estimation workflow is shown in Figure
3. It is based on eo-learn (Aleksandrov et al. 2018),
a collection of open source Python packages that can
be used to access and analyse satellite images. The
workflow consists of several blocks that are designed
to perform specific tasks. The first step deals with
defining the region of interest. In this particular case,
it would be a waterbody for which historical and cur­
rent data are available. Once the region of interest is
selected, the next step is to acquire satellite data for
that region. We use the BlueDot Water Observatory API
to download the geometry of the waterbody. The next
step involves putting the geometry in the bounding
box so that relevant Sentinel-2 data can be down­
loaded. For example, Figure 4(a) shows the actual geo­
metry of the Buendia reservoir. Once this step is
complete, the rest of the work flow is implemented
using the eo-learn package.
To execute the workflow, RGB bands are down­
loaded to visualize the true color images of the water­
bodies. Additionally, NDWI band combination is also
downloaded that will be used for detecting water.
NDWI is a widely used remote sensing index that has
been used for monitoring agricultural drought (Sun
et al. 2013), detecting flood-affected areas (McFeeters
1996) and tasks like mapping waterbodies using high-
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT & WORLD ECOLOGY 5

Table 1. Number of available data samples for different waterbodies.

Water Body Number of Samples
Al Massira Reservoir 101
Buendia Reservoir 67
Thippagondanahalli Reservoir 52
Osman Sagar Lake 98

Figure 3. Workflow for estimating surface area with water.

Figure 4. Buendia reservoir: (a) Water body geometry, and (b) Examples of how NDWI extracts water traces. Higher value of NDWI
correspond to higher water content.

resolution multi-spectral satellite data (Du et al. 2016).
In general, waterbodies tend to reflect very less in the
infra-red part of the spectrum. The NDWI will be able to
recognize any waterbody based on high absorption in
the NIR band. NDWI is defined in equation 1:
Green NIR
NDWI ¼
Green þ NIR
For water surfaces, NDWI will usually be higher.
Usually, a value greater than 0.5 would correspond
to a waterbody (Du et al. 2016). Figure 4(b) shows an
example of how NDWI extracts water traces. Higher
value of NDWI corresponds to higher water content. It
can be observed that some of the image patches have
lower intensity. This can happen when the image has
significant cloud cover that obstructs the view of the
ground. To tackle this problem and correctly estimate
the water level, we would filter out clouds using the
cloud masks feature. Cloud mask feature is provided
by Sentinel Hub and that is used to calculate the valid
(1)
data mask. Here, valid data mean that every pixel of
the image would contain some data and it should be
classified as clear sky without clouds. In our workflow,
we keep the cloud cover threshold at 5% which
means that all the observations with cloud coverage
of more than 5% are filtered out. The next part of the
6 S. MAHAJAN AND J. MARTINEZ
workflow deals with the application of adaptive
thresholding to NDWI images. For this, we would
use the Otsu thresholding method that is a widely
used method to get an optimal threshold (Buma et al.
2018; Huang and Jin 2020). It is an unsupervised and
non-parametric method of threshold selection for pic­
ture segmentation (Otsu 1979). It finds a threshold
value from a bi-modal image histogram. The method
is designed to differentiate between the foreground
and background in an image by creating two separate
classes by having minimum inter-class variance. In
some cases it is possible that there are smaller water­
bodies near the target waterbody boundary. The
water detection and estimation part of the workflow
make sure that only water within the target water­
body border is used for calculating water-level per­
centage. The surface water-level percentage change is
calculated by using equation 2:
Current Water Surface Area
Surface Water Level % ¼
Water Surface Area at 100% Capacity
The above formula estimates the surface water-level
percentage by comparing the current water surface to
the water surface when the waterbody is at full
capacity.
3. Results
In this section, we elaborate the results to show the
trends in water levels for different waterbodies over
the period of two years. We have also considered the
regional climatology of four major cities in the vicinity
of the waterbodies that are studied in this work. With
the drastic global warming, there has been a direct
Figure 5. Buendia reservoir: (a) Monthly average temperature and rainfall data for Madrid from April 2018 to March 2020, (b)
Image patch showing the actual geometry of the water body and the estimated surface area with water, and (c) Percentage
Change in surface area with water.
impact on the waterbodies all over the world. It has
been found that global warming can result in change
in the structure, water levels and even nutrient
dynamics of waterbodies and reservoirs (Jeppesen
et al. 2015). There have also been cases where there
is excessive rainfall due to climate change. It was
observed that for all four cities, the amount of rainfall
increased in 2019 during the months of April to July as
compared to 2018. This is a typical climate change
scenario where an increase in temperature is followed
by increase in the intensity of rainfall. In such cases,
one would expect that the water level would remain
stable or probably increase due to excessive rainfall.
But there have been certain scenarios where water
levels have reduced and there is no flooding even
after an increase in the rain intensity. Such a paradox
could potentially be due to drying of soil (Sharma et al.
2018). This still remains an open topic as researchers
have been trying to understand the complex relation­
(2)
ship between precipitation extremes, flood extremes,
catchment area and hydrologic conditions.
3.1. Case studies
3.1.1. Case study 1: Buendia reservoir, Spain
Figure 5(b) shows an example of how surface area
with water is estimated. The proposed methods esti­
mate the surface area with water in red boundary and
also highlight the actual geometry of the waterbody
(grey boundary). The stress can be clearly observed
through the grey boundary in Figure 5(b) that shows
the part of the reservoir that has dried up. Figure 5(c)
shows the estimated surface area with water levels. It
can be observed that the reservoir water level has been
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT & WORLD ECOLOGY
below 60% over the past two years. No direct correla­
tion can be observed from Figure 5(a) between water
levels, temperature and rainfall change. But the gra­
dual increase in the water levels after December 2019
till March 2020 can be attributed to an increase in the
average rainfall during this period as seen in Figure 5
(a). The drop in the level of Buendia reservoir is sig­
nificant as it is a major source of hydropower genera­
tion and low-water levels would mean higher
electricity prices.
3.1.2. Case study 2: Al Massira reservoir, Morocco
Figure 6(b) shows an example of the surface area
with water and the actual boundary estimated by our
workflow for images acquired on 1 February 2020. The
actual surface with water is highlighted within the red
boundary. The grey boundary depicts the actual geo­
metry of the reservoir. It can be observed from Figure 6
(c) that since April 2018, the water levels of Al Massira
reservoir have been below 50% of the total capacity.
There has been a gradual decrease in the water levels
over the years and as of March 2020, the levels
decreased to almost 30%. This is a drastic dip in the
levels knowing the fact that the reservoir is a key
source of water for agricultural purposes. There can
be several reasons behind the dip in the water levels.
Based on the results in Figure 6(a), it can be observed
that since 2018 there has been a gradual increase in
the temperatures as well as reduction in the average
rainfall that could have led to the shrinking of Al
Massira reservoir.
3.1.3. Case study 3: Osman Sagar lake, India
Figure 7(b) shows the actual boundary of Osman Sagar
lake in grey colour and the surface area with water is
Figure 6. Al Massira reservoir: (a) Monthly average temperature and rainfall data for Marrakesh from April 2018 to March 2020, (b)
Image patch showing the actual geometry of the water body and the estimated surface area with water, and (c) Percentage
Change in surface area with water.
7
shown within the red boundary for data recorded on
24 January 2020. It can be inferred that Osman Sagar
lake has been adversely affected by the overuse of
water, rise in temperature and low rainfall over the
years. As observed in Figure 7(c), the percentage of
surface area with water went down from March 2019
till February 2020. Comparing the average rainfall in
2018 and 2019 in Figure 7(a), it can be observed that in
2019 Hyderabad received more rainfall. As per the local
authorities, the reason for low water level was the lack
of rain in the Osman Sagar’s catchment areas.6 This is
a matter of concern as Osman Sagar is one of the main
sources of water for residents of Hyderabad and
a source of revenue generated through tourism. The
change in the water level has resulted in regional water
crisis and could potentially lead to indirect impacts like
human migration, lower food production and biodi­
versity loss.
3.1.4. Case study 4: Thippagondanahalli reservoir,
India
Figure 8(b) shows the estimated surface area with
water of Thippagondanahalli reservoir on
29 January 2020. The grey boundary shows the area
around the edges that has dried out. As observed in
Figure 8(c), the reservoir was at its full capacity in 2018.
The first half of 2019 shows a drastic dip in the surface
area with water. The drying up could be attributed to
an increase in temperature during the months of April
to June 2019 as shown in Figure 8(a). The surface water
levels started gradually increasing during the later part
of 2019 due to heavy rainfall. The fact that
Thippagondanahalli reservoir is a major source of
8 S. MAHAJAN AND J. MARTINEZ

Figure 7. Osman Sagar lake: (a) Monthly average temperature and rainfall data for Hyderabad from April 2018 to March 2020, (b)
Image patch showing the actual geometry of the water body and the estimated surface area with water, and (c) Percentage
Change in surface area with water.

Figure 8. Thippagondanahalli reservoir: (a) Monthly average temperature and rainfall data for Bengaluru from April 2018 to
March 2020, (b) Image patch showing the actual geometry of the water body and the estimated surface area with water, and (c)
Percentage Change in surface area with water.

drinking water for people in West Bengaluru, such
major fluctuations in the water level are a matter of
concern.
3.2. Validation
Validation of results is important for accuracy assess­
ment of any method. To the best of our knowledge,
there are no open access surface water area data for the
four waterbodies that we have considered. We
considered state-of-the-art databases that have already
been used by the researchers in the past like Global
Reservoir and Lake Monitor (Keys and Scott 2018),
Hydroweb (Liu and Yue 2017) and ICESat-2 by NASA
(Xu et al. 2020) but there is no availability of historical or
real-time data for the waterbodies that are analysed in
Section 3.2. We would like to emphasise here that the
very reason we chose those four waterbodies in the first
instance was the sustainability issues related to them
and unavailability of sufficient reference/official data.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT & WORLD ECOLOGY
To address the validation issue, we tested the pro­
posed method on four additional waterbodies that had
the satellite data as well as the reference water surface
area data available. The waterbodies were chosen
based on the availability of satellite data as well as
continuous reference data. We considered data for
four lakes in Texas, USA during the time period of
1 January 2017 to 1 August 2020. The reference water
surface area data were obtained through Water Data
for Texas7 that is operated by the Texas Water
Development Board. The database includes near real-
time instantaneous water-level data for all the water­
bodies in Texas. The database includes data related to
reservoir storage, percentage full, conservation sto­
rage, conservation capacity, and surface area. We con­
sidered the surface area (in acres) data from the
database that includes time-series for data sampled
daily. It was used to calculate the percentage change
in surface area, which was later used for validation of
our approach. Table 2 shows the details of four water­
bodies, including the surface area, number of available
samples and the validation result in terms of average
percentage error. Samples with over 5% cloud cover
were filtered. Also, for some days there was no data
recorded on the ground, so the satellite data samples
corresponding to those dates had to be discarded.
Table 2. Description of lakes, number of available samples and validation results.
Lakes Surface Area (Acres)
Lake Tyler 4,900
Lake Buchanan 22,330
Lake Lyndon B. Johnson 6,273
Navarro Mills Lake 4,736
Figure 9. Accuracy assessment of the proposed method by comparing the results for four lakes with reference data.
9
It can be observed from Table 2 that the average
percentage error in surface water-level estimation is
low for all the cases. Figure 9 compares the cumulative
distribution function (CDF) of the accuracy of the pro­
posed method in estimating the surface area percen­
tage with water. The X-Axis shows the average
percentage error offset between the ground truth
(i.e., data from Water Data for Texas) and measure­
ments obtained using the proposed method for four
lakes. For Lake Buchanan and Navarro Mills Lake, 80%
of the observations have an offset below 1%. For Lake
Tyler, more than 90% of the observation have an offset
below 4%. For Lake Lyndon B. Johnson, 80% of the
observations have an offset below 5%. The low error
rate validates the performance of the proposed
method and shows that such method can potentially
be used to complement the conventional surface
water-level estimation methods.
4. Discussion
4.1. Consequences of shrinking water bodies
Water bodies around the globe are shrinking. There
can be various reasons but the most important are
climate change, drought, urbanization and population
Samples Estimation of Surface Area with Water (Average % Error)
42 2.4
74 0.5
46 3.5
37 0.9
10 S. MAHAJAN AND J. MARTINEZ
growth. The consequences of climate change related
to water resources are mainly changes in the precipita­
tion patterns and increase in the temperature. This
directly impacts the people who live near the water
sources and depend on their survival (Dong et al.
2008). Depending on regions, the climate change can
affect different places in different ways. For example,
the Aral Sea, formerly the fourth largest lake in area is
a well-known water management disaster case.
Between 1960 and 1987, the water levels of Aral Sea
decreased by almost 13 meters and the surface area
decreased by 40% (Micklin 2007). This is just one exam­
ple where a major water source for irrigation dried up
due to the water management errors that eventually
triggered an environmental disaster with severe huma­
nitarian consequences. It is well known that shrinking
reservoirs can have severe destabilizing consequences
(Inogwabini 2017). Some of the regions might have
alternative water sources to maintain the water supply
but for cities like Hyderabad and Bangaluru with over
10 million people and scarce water resources, the con­
sequences can be extreme. It could lead to mass migra­
tion, socio-economic issues as well as political
disruption. Open satellite data and tools can provide
new opportunities for local and regional institutions
and support water resource management that could
include better monitoring, analysis and decision
making.
4.2. Capacity building for sustainable
development
With the growing challenges related to environment
monitoring and sustainable development, satellite
imagery has emerged as a viable solution (Streets
et al. 1995). In this work, we have highlighted how
open data and available technological tools can be
successfully used to implement a workflow for mon­
itoring and estimating surface area with water. We
have highlighted four cases where there has been
a significant change in the surface area with water
over the past two years. With the significant change
in the climate all over the world, it is obvious that the
biggest impact would be on the people living in devel­
oping and under developed countries. This makes it
important to have tools and systems that can identify
the challenges related to water crisis, and provide
recommendations to facilitate multi-stakeholder part­
nerships in sustainable resource monitoring at local
and regional level.
Missions like Copernicus Sentinel-2 are already pro­
viding accessible high-level data that can potentially
be used to make significant contributions to themes
like land cover change monitoring and water-level
monitoring (Traganos et al. 2018). With the access to
high-resolution data, it is possible to create commu­
nities at local and regional levels that can work in close
collaboration with the ministries responsible for envir­
onment management and share data and insights.
Water-level monitoring and estimation are one such
case but there is potential to implement it for monitor­
ing other vital resources. With the technological
advances, there is a huge potential to analyse high-
resolution satellite imagery data to understand the
changing environment. But, there are still many chal­
lenges that need to be resolved before scaling up the
use of remote sensing data. These challenges are
mainly related to data acquisition, storage, interpreta­
tion and visualization. Most of the local and regional
governments can benefit from a strong collaboration
between satellite imagery experts and local/regional
data centers. This could potentially help in capacity
building as well as lead to data informed decision
making. Developing and under developed countries
could be the main beneficiaries, especially the regions
where the decision makers have limited technology
and resources. With the availability of open data and
tools, a strong collaboration with the local technologi­
cal community could be a step towards sustainable
resource management at local level.
5. Conclusions
Shrinking of waterbodies is a global problem. The
worst affected regions are the ones that lack an effi­
cient data collection infrastructure and resources to
monitor and understand the hazards. This underlines
the importance of capacity building at grassroots by
using satellite imagery data and open access computa­
tional tools to translate the data into useful informa­
tion that can lead to data informed decision making. In
this work, we show that NDWI based on Sentinel-2
imagery data can be successfully implemented for
extraction and estimation of water surface area of
lakes and reservoirs. We created a workflow to access
high-resolution satellite data that is then processed
using eo-learn open-source Python package to esti­
mate surface area with water. To highlight how these
open resources can be leveraged to understand and
support water-level management at regional levels, we
used four case studies considering four regionally
important waterbodies around the world. With the
surface water-level estimation workflow, we were
able to provide insight into the trends related to
shrinking of waterbodies. The performance of the pro­
posed method was validated by testing it on four
additional lakes. The results were encouraging, with
average percentage error for surface area with water
estimation ranging between 0.5% and 3.5%. In parti­
cular, we were able to show that with the advance­
ment in the satellite imagery and data accessibility, it
has become easier than ever to engage more actively
with satellite data. Complex satellite data can be trans­
lated into meaningful information that can be
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT & WORLD ECOLOGY
understood by the experts as well as the community
members. This can potentially be used for capacity
building as well as creating evidence-based policies
for water resource management.
As high-resolution satellite data become more
accessible, it will make it possible to monitor and
understand how global water resources are changing.
That being said, it does not eliminate the use of tradi­
tional monitoring methods. Satellite data could be
used to complement the traditional water resources
monitoring methods. Future work is warranted to
understand how remotely sensed satellite data can
be integrated with the conventional water monitoring
methods to create and efficient and accurate water-
level monitoring framework.
Notes
1. https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/04/its-not-just-cape-
town-4-shrinking-reservoirs-watch
2. https://qz.com/india/1,657,760/satellite-images-show-
why-chennai-mumbai-bengaluru-went-dry/
3. https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/missions/senti­
nel-2/overview
4. https://eos.com/lv/
5. https://www.worldweatheronline.com/developer/
6. https://newsmeter.in/satellite-images-of-hyds-
osmansagar-show-reservoir-receives-no-inflow-to-the
-lake-despite-heavy-rains/
7. https://waterdatafortexas.org/reservoirs/statewide
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the developer team as well as the
contributors of eo-learn Python packages for designing open
access tools that make it easier for everyone to access and
analyse spatio-temporal image sequences.
Disclosure statement
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
Funding
This research received no external funding.
ORCID
Sachit Mahajan http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9558-8895
Jenny Martinez http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8954-8731
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