Article Monitoring the Spatial and Temporal Variations in The Water Surface and Floating Algal Bloom Areas in Dongting Lake Using a Long-Term MODIS Image Time Series 1, 1,2, , 3 4 1 Mengmeng Cao y , Kebiao Mao * y , Xinyi Shen , Tongren Xu , Yibo Yan and Zijin Yuan 1 1 Hulunbeir Grassland Ecosystem Research Station, Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China;
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[email protected]; Tel.: +86-010-8210-8769 These authors contributed equally to this work and should be considered co-first authors. y Received: 11 September 2020; Accepted: 2 November 2020; Published: 4 November 2020 Abstract: Significant water quality changes have been observed in the Dongting Lake region due to environmental changes and the strong influence of human activities. To protect and manage Dongting Lake, the long-term dynamics of the water surface and algal bloom areas were systematically analyzed and quantified for the first time based on 17 years of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) observations. The traditional methods (index-based threshold algorithms) were optimized by a dynamic learning neural network (DL-NN) to extract and identify the water surface area and algal bloom area while reducing the extraction complexity and improving the extraction accuracy.