Mapeo de ambientes en el Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, Provincia de Santa Cruz – Argentina (Glaciar Upsala y Perito Moreno), mediante datos ópticos y radar e integración en un SIG

Abstract

Los Glaciares Argentina National Park is located in Andes Patagonicos and it belongs to Santa Cruz province and it limits with Chile country. It was declared Natural Patrimony of Mankind by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1981. An important part of this Park is covered by glaciers and the ice rivers give form to the landscape with abrupt hillsides mountains and wide valleys. Nowadays, the ice occupies approximately an area of 2.600 km2, with 47 major glaciers. The study area of this work is the Glacier Perito Moreno located over Brazo Sur that belongs to the Lago Argentino and the Glaciar Upsala located over Brazo Norte of the same lake. Besides, the environment surrenders of both glaciers are taken into account to carry out a complete study of this important area. Satellite data has proved to be very important for monitoring and evaluating natural resources. The objective of this paper is to carry out a thematic map of the natural resources of this area. In this way the different environment can be identified, characterized and the physiognomic natural forest unities described so a thematic cartography of the different identified unities are obtained. Polarimetric RADARSAT-2 and optical Landsat 5 TM images were used to generate this cartography. Digital processing, supervised classification, polarimetric analysis techniques are applied to integrate radar and optical data, taking into account both technologies at the same time. All the thematic cartography will be added to a GIS.

Revista Ciencias Espaciales, Volumen 8, Número 1 Primavera, 2015; 327-343