Aquatic plants play a key role in ecosystem balancing. However, their unbalanced growth can clog canals, dams, and reservoirs, affecting multiple uses of water. Control of submerged aquatic plants is a complex task due to the difficulty in volumetrically mapping and quantifying the colonized areas. In these cases, the use of hydro-acoustic data allows mapping and measuring these areas, helping formulate proposals for sustainable management of this type of aquatic vegetation. This study used the kriging technique and acoustic data to perform the spatial inference of the biovolume of submerged aquatic plants. The data was obtained from three echobathimetric surveys conducted in a Paraná River study area, characterized by the proliferation of submerged aquatic vegetation, hindering navigation. High spatial resolution multi-spectral imagery World View-2 was used to delimit the areas with submerged aquatic plants. The mapping of the bio-volume of submerged aquatic plants was conducted through the bio-volume inference using the Kriging technique and slicing of the inferred values at 15% intervals. The map generated allowed identifying the areas of highest concentration of submerged macrophytes, which predominantly presented bio-volume values between 15-30% and 30-45%. This confirms the feasibility of using the kriging technique for biovolume spatial inference through geo-referenced ecobathimetric measurements and the support of high spatial resolution imagery.
acoustic remote sensing; inference by Kriging; bio-volume spatial distribution; high-resolution imagery
