In the last week of May 2024, the jubilee tenth Symposium “Steppes of Northern Eurasia” (The Steppe Forum of the Russian Geographical Society) was held in Orenburg, in the work of which Stanislav Shinkarenko, a senior researcher of the Satellite Monitoring Technologies Department of the Space Research Institute (IKI RAS), took part.
In his report “Prospects of satellite monitoring of the state of steppe and desert landscapes”, S. Shinkarenko presented the current developments of IKI RAS on mapping vegetation of the desert zone and subzone of desertified steppes, determining the projective cover and phytomass using satellite data, which was obtained within the framework of the Most Important Innovation Project of State Importance “Single National Climate Active Substances Monitoring System”.
The report demonstrates the importance determining the characteristics of the fire regime and grazing loads when studying the patterns of the dynamics of the state of steppe and desert landscapes. The links between the values of vegetation indices obtained from satellite data, projective cover, and phytomass for various plant communities have been established, which in the future opens up opportunities for their large-scale monitoring.
A limiting factor in remote monitoring of the state of steppe and desert vegetation, including carbon fluxes, is the lack of reliable and homogeneous ground-based data. Creating a network of test sites of extensive and intensive levels in steppe and desert zones is aimed at solving this problem. In his report, S. Shinkarenko also raised the problems of the necessity of typology and inventory of steppes of Russia, the complexity of assessing the state of steppe and desert vegetation associated with physiological characteristics, significant intraseasonal and interannual dynamics.
