Participants: Institute of Ecology - BAS, BASA-ReSAC
For the implementation of the scientific research "Identification and determination of the location and area of the natural and artificial standing wetlands on the territory of Bulgaria” in the frame of the project “Inventory of the wetlands in Bulgaria” of the “Le Balkan” Foundation, standing wetlands in Bulgaria were mapped in scale 1:50 000.
Topographic maps in scale 1:50 000 and satellite images from Landsat-TM and Landsat-ETM with the spatial resolution 30m from year 1989 till 2000 were used. More than 7800 wetlands were identified, as only water mirror was mapped. Attributive information for approximately 2100 of them was added for name of the object, closest settlement, river and catchment on which they belong. For all the rest objects area and geographic location were determined. For mapping of the wetlands different techniques for image processing were used – supervised and unsupervised classification of the images, visual interpretation and digitalisation.
This is the first mapping in GIS format of all wetlands in Bulgaria, and database created for their area and location is unique. Later mapping not only of the water mirror, but also on the territories occupied with macrophytes around wetlands is proposed.
