Predicted extent and age of the reedbelt surrounding Neusiedler Lake

The continuous reed belt ('Phragmites australis') around the Fertö/Neusiedler Lake area is the largest reed area in Europe after the Danube delta and forms the habitat of many threatened species. The reed belt itself is of varying width, extent and age, and Reed also has grown substantially in nearby smaller shallow lakes (such as the area of the Zicksee).As part of the Biodiversa+ funded INSPIRE project we here provide a Earth-observation based classification of both Reed extent and approximate age around the Fertö/Neusiedler Lake area. As input data served hand-digitized reed age (shown in Nemeth et al) as well as manually classified areas with recent disturbances (known fire locations) or reed growth. For the classification we utilized Geospatial embedding data (based on Sentinel 1/2) available as time series from 2017 to 2024 at 10 m resolution, and applied a combination of gradient descent boosting and deep learning algorithms to identify multi-class probabilities. We distinguish both changes in reed dynamics but also make an approximate classification of reed age and of the varying width of the 'Seewall' (a buffer towards the lake area with width >1 to 200 m). The full procedure will be explained in an upcoming publication (Jung et al., In prep). An interactive webplatform to explore the classified layer can be found here.