Vegetation

Bucharest – Kiseleff Park NDVI Comparison April 2019 vs. April 2020

A fun fact regarding our project is that we actually got our research question idea when our teacher told us that she had seen a significant increase in vegetation in our area compared to the previous years just by walking to school. That sounded very interesting to us, so we immediately thought that we could investigate this topic by using satellite data and additional proccessing to see whether the lockdown and lower circulation did really have an impact on the greenery of Bucharest.
We proceeded with our scientific research and used a Sentinel custom script to analyse the NDVI (Normalized difference vegetation index), an indicator assessing whether or not the target being observed contains live green vegetation. In-depth explanations regarding NDVI calculation can be found on the Theoretical Aspects page of our website.
The first area we took into consideration was the one surrounding our high school, more specifically the Kisseleff Park, a large green area in the heart of Romania’s capital city. In our analysis, we considered images from late April in 2019 and 2020 (when the pandemic was at its peak and the whole country was under strict lockdown).
As shown in the dynamic comparison below, the satellite image from 2020 has a way darker green pigment, meaning there had been an increase in vegetation due to the restrictions, as we initially suspected.

We extended our investigation to a more crowded area, the biggest highway in Romania (A1), and chose a spot surrounded by vegetation. By sliding the cursor in the dynamic image comparison below, it is obvious that in 2020 (right side), the vegetation developed compared to 2019 (left side).