Thermodynamic Satellite Monitoring of the Health of Forest Ecosystems in the Gulf of Finland Catchment Area (Using the Example of the Karelian Isthmus)

Monitoring of ecosystem health is an urgent problem of environmental safety. S.E. Jørgensen and Yu.M. Svirezhev [15] have worked out the basics of the thermodynamic theory of ecosystems. It is shown that the exergy of solar radiation absorbed by an ecosystem is spent on carbon deposition and the removal of entropy from the ecosystem, generated by anthropogenic and natural impact. The criterion for the health of the ecosystem is the exergy contained in it. In this paper, the rate of ecosystem evapotranspiration is used for satellite mapping of ecosystem health. For this purpose, a thermodynamic impact index was introduced equal to the ratio of evapotranspiration of an impacted ecosystem to evapotranspiration of a healthy ecosystem. The ecosystem of specially protected areas or the ecosystem of a given species with the highest evapotranspiration value can be used as a healthy standard of ecosystem. A feature of this study is the introduction of technology for thermodynamic satellite mapping of ecosystem health in the “IKI-Monitoring” Center for Collective Use, including in the Vega-Science system, where, since 2001, a database of 8-day satellite composites of evapotranspiration (spatial resolution 500 × 500 m) for the entire territory of Russia has been collected in the automatic mode. The ecosystem of the Karelian Isthmus, as a representative territory of the catchment area of the Gulf of Finland, was chosen as the research object. Three examples of natural and anthropogenic effects on ecosystem demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed ecosystem health measure. It is shown that the sensitivity of the technology to ecosystem health disorders is so high that it allows mapping local ecosystem health disorders, the spatial dimensions of which are an order of magnitude smaller than the resolution of the used evapotranspiration satellite maps. It is concluded that the developed technology can be quickly applied by regional environmental authorities throughout Russia for operational synoptic analysis of the health of the ecosystem.