with Ramesh Sivanpillai2 and Alexandre Latchininsky3 Mapping Changes in Asian Migratory Locust Habitat in Central Asia using Moderate Resolution Landsat Imagery Matthew Jolivet1 with Ramesh Sivanpillai2 and Alexandre Latchininsky3 1. University of Wyoming Department of Plant Sciences. 2. UW dept. of Botany 3. UW Agricultural Extension Service - Entomology

Aral Sea Aral Sea once the 4th largest lake on earth Amu Darya River to the South feeds the Greater part of Aral Sea Water has been diverted for irrigation since the 1960’s Larger Aral expected to be gone by 2025 Source: Gapparov and Latchininsky, 2000 p41

Aral Sea – Water Loss 1989 2003 2009

The once bustling Aral Sea fishing Community was destroyed and local economies left devastated! The shoreline receded 80 – 100 km Muynak once a port town fishing community

Vegetation Phragmites (Reeds) Saxoul (2 m tall) Tamarix Most dominant veg Saxoul (2 m tall) Tamarix Grasses and forbs Shrinking Aral Sea – more areas are available for vegetation to grow

Reeds: Phragmites australis Successful during primary succession. Grow very quickly Excellent source of nutrition Highly variable growth – dependent on water flow through the Amu Darya Grow on dry land as well as submerged marsh areas. Provide food for Asian Migratory locust nymphs and are a requirement for growth and survival in the local setting

Asian Migratory Locust: Locusta migratoria AML is capable of gregarious behavior making it extremely destructive to crops Range of 1000km during swarm flights – possible migrations from Europe to Australia Select oviposition (egg bed) sites within dry loose soil in and around reeds Flightless until the adult part of their life cycle so habitat will be in reed beds.

Gregarious Behavior

Subsistence Farming Farms located south of Aral Sea are first in line for destruction by AML Already devastated local economies cannot withstand agricultural destruction Plant Protection Agencies are tasked to deal with massive locust outbreaks which happen about once per decade.

Locust Control Area too large to apply necessary chemicals Much of the sea bed is inaccessible to ground based survey – lack of roads and massive muddy bogs “Spray and pray”- current control method with poor results 100,000 hectares treated annually with areal sprays Overuse of pesticides fuels an already out of hand ecological disaster Plant protection agency officials in search of updated information about locations of locust habitat and then relate to locust outbreak potential

Remote Sensing Make observations from space or aircraft Information for a large geographic area Landsat – US owned satellite Image – process them – to generate maps

Image Processing Landsat imagery available free to the public from USGS Processed these images in Erdas Imagine Pixels were grouped into statistically similar clusters (unsupervised classification) based on their reflectance values Assign clusters to land or map classes such as phragmites, water, bare ground etc. Evaluate the accuracy and publish the maps

Unsupervised Classification

Unsupervised Classification

Results 1986 – 207,811.71 hectares 1998 – 528,393.52 hectares

Results But not all of these are locust habitats Some are submerged – will not support oviposition sites or support immobile nymphs Further work is required to separate reeds that are submerged from those that are in dry land soils

Results (cont.) Other vegetation mixed in with Phragmites reeds No ground data to make an accuracy assessment

Map Uses Uzbekistan plant protection officials can improve their decisions Map reeds during oviposition (fall) Map reeds during hatching (spring) More efficient use of pesticide sprays Future predictions of Locust outbreaks based on habitat mapping

Special Thanks Dr. Ramesh Sivanpillai Dr. Alexandre Latchininsky Your tireless efforts and input made this possible and sparked my interest in the field of remote sensing and pest control Thanks for the contribution of the pictures for this presentation