Remote Monitoring of PSD Slope Under the Influence of Sand Dredging Activities in Lake Hongze Based on Landsat-8/OLI Data and VIIRS/DNB Night-Time Light Composite Data

Particle size distribution (PSD) is an important characterization parameter of the particle size structure of suspended particles, which is vulnerable to human activities such as sand dredging. In this study, sand dredging numbers were evaluated by the accumulated radiance algorithm using the night-time light composite data of the visible infrared imaging radiometer suite, and the PSD slope was derived by band ratio algorithm of Landsat8/operational land imager (OLI) imagery. Then, the influence of sand mining on PSD slope was analyzed. We draw several crucial findings. First, the ratio of R
_rs(Red)
toR
_rs(Green)
based on OLI imagery was capable of retrieving PSD slope with good robustness (R
²
= 0.71, p <; 0.01, n = 41) and verified acceptance (mean absolute percentage error = 4.29%, root mean square error = 0.19, n = 20), and the PSD slope in HZL was lower in summer than in the other seasons from 2014 to 2017. Second, The night active vessels extracted from the night-time images show that sand dredging activities began at the outlet of Chengzi Lake (CZL) in April 2012, spread to the whole lake between 2014 and 2016, and then stopped in the northeast region in March 2017 due to the strict control of the local government. Third, the PSD slope is strongly influenced by sand mining, which is positively correlated with the number of sand dredgers (R
²
= 0.92), i.e., the PSD slope increases 0.21 per 100 working sand dredgers in CZL.