Shushanik Asmaryan

Center for Ecological-Noosphere Studies | CENS · GIS and Remote Sensing

PTE contamination of soils remains one of the global environmental concerns. The ways of detecting and monitoring PTE concentrations in soils varies including traditional field sampling accompanied by sample preparation and chemical analysis and state of the art visible and near-infrared (Vis-NIR) spectroscopic approaches. Among the different Machi...

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of links between satellite-measured vegetation vigor and climate variables in Armenian mountain grassland ecosystems in the years 1984–2018. NDVI is derived from MODIS and LANDSAT data, temperature and precipitation data are from meteorological stations. Two study sites were selected, representing arid a...

Coastal management has a critical role in estimating the coastal environmental and socio-economic dynamics, providing various vital regional and local services. Remote sensing earth observations are essential for detecting and monitoring shorelines. UAVs combined with satellite remote sensing address the shoreline delineation problems to detect the...

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of links between satellite-measured vegetation vigor and climate variables in Armenian mountain grassland ecosystems in years 1984–2018. NDVI is derived from MODIS and Landsat data, temperature and precipitation data are from meteorological stations. Two study sites were selected, representing arid and s...

Coastal management has a critical role in estimating the coastal environmental and socioeconomic dynamics , providing various vital regional and local services. Earth observations and remote sensing are essential methods in coastal observation for studying and monitoring coastlines. UAVs combined with remote sensing address the shoreline delineatio...

Coastal management has a critical role in estimating the coastal environmental and socioeconomic dynamics , providing various vital regional and local services. Earth observations and remote sensing are essential methods in coastal observation for studying and monitoring coastlines. UAVs combined with remote sensing address the shoreline delineatio...

The air temperature is a critical factor in many societal challenges to protect human health and the environment. Moreover, a vital climatic parameter, the temperature has a direct impact on evaporation, frost, and snow melting. Temperature predictions are based mainly on numerical and statistical models. Sometimes it is a challenge to improve the...

The city of Yerevan, Armenia has undergone major environmental and economic changes after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The objectives of this study were to: (i) investigate the changes of the Land Cover (LC) and Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI) in Yerevan and analyze relations between them, (ii) study the relationships between land surface tem...

The paper presents the range and applications of thematic tasks for ultra-high spatial resolution data from small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the integral system of environmental multi-platform and multi-scaled monitoring of Lake Sevan, which is one of the greatest freshwater lakes in Eurasia. From the 1930s, it had been subjected to human-d...

The main goal of this research was to estimate heavy metals (HMs) (molybdenum (Mo), copper (Cu), nickel (Ni), cadmium (Cd)) contents in crop leaves through multispectral satellite imagery. During the acquisition of a SPOT 7 satellite image (28 July 2017) in situ sampling (38 samples) was done from the leaves of potatoes and beans growing close to t...

Shoreline changes are important indicators of natural and manmade impacts on inland waters and particularly lakes. Man-induced changes in Lake Sevan water level during the 20th century affected not only the ecological status of the Sevan water but also near-shore areas. This article considers a long-term study of changes in Lake Sevan shoreline tha...

Honey is a highly nutritious natural product widely produced and consumed by people in Shirak and Syunik regions of Armenia. Unlike Shirak, Syunik is under the impact of mining industry. Since the environmental pollution can adversely impact the safety of honey and entail a probable risk to human health, it is important to evaluate the presence of...

Environmental issues become an increasing global concern because of the continuous pressure on natural resources. Earth observations (EO), which include both satellite/UAV and in-situ data, can provide robust monitoring for various environmental concerns. The realization of the full information potential of EO data requires innovative tools to mini...

In this paper, we study vegetation, temperature, and precipitation dynamics, as well as their correlations and lag-time effects in mountain ecosystems of Armenia using SPOT/VGT NDVI data over the period 1998–2013. Three study sites near the Sisian, Megri and Kajaran meteorological stations were chosen, representing steep, xerophytic and meadow vege...

Soils samples collected during different geochemical surveys of the city of Kajaran located near the biggest Cu-Mo mining area in Armenia were subjected to the multivariate geostatistical analysis and geochemical mapping in order to reveal soil heavy metals spatial distribution pattern and assess human health risk level under continuous impact of m...

It is proposed to take into account the historical aspects of mining impact on the environment when the location of new mining enterprises are chosen and the current environmental situation in mining regions are assessed. Analysis of the impact of deposit development on the environment in the historical context makes it possible to study the adapti...

Earth Science community depends on the exploration, analysis and reprocessing of high volumes of data as well as the modeling and simulation of complex coupled systems on multiple scales. The main aim of this article is to introduce a new hydrological modeling service based on the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) (Arnold et al. J American Wate...

Lake Sevan being Armenia’s largest freshwater reservoir has a vital economic, recreational and cultural importance to both the catchment area and the nation as a whole. At present the Sevan which has seen the dramatic - some 20m drop - in water level entailing grave ecological consequences to the whole of its ecosystem, is at the stage of recovery....

This study of vegetation biomass for different areas in the mountain ecosystems of Armenia was implemented for the vegetation period of 2013. The research was done based on time series of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) as NDVI images have been proven to be a powerful tool to monitor biomass growth during the last decade. NDVI, which...

The main areas of the use of remote sensing technologies in Armenia are considered in the article. The basic scientific-technological resources for their perspective development are also discussed. The later will serve a background for the development of remote sensing methods and monitoring system in the future.

Regional landscape-ecological studies have acquired a special topicality as they assure efficient environmental conservation and sustainable use of natural resources. A landscape-ecological analysis was performed based on 4 basic integral indices:1. ecological potential, 2. ecological stability, 3. ecological load, 4. ecological tension. The values...

Once the most industrialized republic of the Soviet Union, Armenia inherited a dramatic ecological situation from the Soviet era. As the key national environmental academic entity, the Center for Ecological‐Noosphere Studies (CENS) of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia has a strong national role in delivering authoritative...

The migration of spatial data, services and applications to the network environment is a characteristic feature of spatial data infrastructures (SDI) era. Some examples are illustrated as experiences of implementing geo-portal GeoMETA-IGRAN (http://asdi.igras.ru), virtual GIS laboratory on the cloud service UniHUB (http://www.unihub.ru), OpenGeo (h...

The main objective of this paper is to introduce a portal of geoprocessing services that can be used to compute either a single vegetation index or a combination of vegetation indices, as a workflow. High Performance Computing (HPC) resources are used for the calculations, and the Web Processing Service (WPS) standard is used to handle the requests...

Armenia is a small country geographically located in the South Caucasus region. Once the most industrialized republic of the Soviet Union, the country inherited a dramatic ecological situation from the Soviet era. After the mid‐1990s, the economic policy of Armenia shifted towards a strong support for industrial development greatly ignoring ecologi...

The article considers the approaches of the development of the remote sensing methods of the assessment of the levels of heavy metal pollution of soils by collation of multi-spectral satellite imagery and geochemical data. As a result, direct and reversible correlation links were revealed between absolute total contents of heavy metals (Pb, Cr,V, T...

The main tools of GIS-technologies applied in the environmental studies of natural and anthropogenic systems in Armenia are considered in the article. The results of assessing the sustainability of urban morpholitosystem and the rationality of the spatial planning of the city of Yerevan are presented. In addition, the main reasons and prerequisites...

Abstract: In mountain regions such as Lake Sevan basin, landscape-ecological problems are manifested sharply. Lake Sevan basin lies in the east of the RA (Republic of Armenia) and is characterized by unique natural and economic peculiarities. It covers an area of 4,891 km2, or 16% of the entire territory of the country. The article considers the dy...

A small urban park in Yerevan, Armenia, was studied using biogechemicalanalysis of the tree canopy, field spectral reflectance measurements of tree leaves, simulated WorldView-2 multispectral data generated from the leaf spectra, and two summer images of real WorldView-2 data. The tree canopy of the park is dominated by two trees, Robiniapseudoacac...

Armenia as a developing country has a very severe need to integrate and collaborate with the international Geospatial community in order to build a re-liable and efficient geospatial infrastructure. Moreover, the availability of such an infrastructure could foster the availability of geospatial data, could facilitate the development of a data shari...

The remains of the natural and human activities in some parts of the earth register as geopark. Actually, geopark is one or more geological phenomenon which is important from ecology, history, culture and archeological view. The aim of the geotourism description in an area and creating a geopark is trying to keep the earth's inheritance and localit...

Today, most global and local environmental issues are connected with the disturbance of natural equilibrium of chemical elements, which is manifested by two contrary but synchronous and interconnected geochemical processes: dispersion and concentration of chemical elements. The ecological consequence of those intensively running processes is pollut...

Space limitations arising from human activities affect demographic structure and performance of mammalian populations and thus reduce their viability. This is especially true for wide-ranging wild cats (family Felidae) which generally lead solitary lives and require large tracts of good-quality habitats for survival (Sunquist and Sunquist 2001). As...

The Persian leopard (Panthera pardus saxicolor) is endangered throughout its distribution area in the Middle East. In this article, we briefly describe its global range and then emphasize the status, distri-bution, and threats in Armenia. The principal factors jeopardizing the long-term survival of the Persian leopard in Armenia are disturbance, po...