IMPLEMENTATION OF TECHNOLOGIES IN THE PUBLIC SERVICE: GEOMATICS IN THE CLOUD FOR MONITORING WETLANDS IN PROTECTED AREAS

Abstract. Wetlands protection has been a constitutive part of the conservation strategies that the Chilean Forest Service has implemented in the Protected Wild Areas of Chile. These ecosystems are highly vulnerable to changes in their hydrological regime, generating direct effects on the biodiversity associated with them. These changes may be related to the rainfall regime, however, the activities of drainage, overgrazing, landfill, or tributary deviation are the greatest threats that these ecosystems face today. For years, long-term satellite information was dismissed in the Chilean public service due to the lack of technical, computational or software capabilities. Nowadays, cloud computing tools with massive geodata analysis have democratized remote sensing, giving way to the development of web applications and online information analysis platforms. An interactive web application was developed in Google Earth Engine (GEE) that uses spectral indexes correlated with the presence of water, generating estimates in “almost real time” on Landsat and Sentinel-2 images. The Surface Water Satellite Monitoring Platform allows the automatic processing through the internet of the images available for the analyzed wetlands, overcoming the time and computational capacity restrictions required with conventional geomatics programs. This has allowed to support the management of these ecosystems, reducing the costs of field work and increasing the efficiency in the monitoring of wetlands in the Protected Wild Areas of Chile.