Remote sensing evaluation of ecological restoration engineering effect: A case study of the Yongding River Watershed, China.

Ecological restoration has been risen to a national strategic project for China and become an significant way to realize ecological civilization construction. As an important way to measure the effectiveness of ecological restoration engineering, the corresponding evaluation provides a reliable basis for ecological restoration decision-making and ecosystem management. Based on remote sensing technology with the advantages of short revisit time, large monitoring range, high spatial resolution, this paper proposes a remote sensing evaluation method of watershed ecological restoration effect, so as to monitor the implementation effect of ecological restoration engineering in the watershed and technically check whether the expected goals set before the restoration are achieved. The comprehensive ecological restoration engineering of Yongding River has been implemented since 2016, and it was the first focus of the coordinated development of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region to make advances in ecology. In this paper, year 2015 and 2020 were selected as the before and the after the ecological restoration engineering of Yongding River. The research object was the riparian zone from Luopoling Reservoir to Daning Reservoir in Yongding River Watershed. After obtaining and processing remote sensing images, ZY-3 images were used to obtain land cover data by means of human-computer interactive interpretation, and Landsat images were used to retrieve NDVI data. Based on these data, the changes of the eight indicators of water resources, water ecology and ecological function in the study area were calculated to evaluate the ecological restoration engineering effect. The results showed that the study area has basically realized the maintenance of ecological water quantity, formed the ecological corridor of Yongding River, and effectively enhanced the ecological function and improved the water environment. By verifying the feasibility of remote sensing evaluation method, this paper could provide relevant decision makers and planners with an effective evaluation method for the ecological restoration engineering effect based on remote sensing data and technology. • Remote sensing images and land cover data were utilized to calculate the indicators before and after ecological restoration. • Ecological restoration engineering effect was evaluated from water resources, water environment and ecological function. • Based on the proposed method, the ecological restoration effect in the study area was proved to be satisfactory overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]