Regime shifts in shallow lakes observed by remote sensing and the implications for management

Abstract Shallow lakes are one of the most complex aquatic systems and are known to shift between a macrophyte-dominated clear-water state and a phytoplankton-dominated turbid state. We developed a decision-tree classification based on the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) to classify the major vegetation cover types in shallow lakes and documented the vegetation in Gehu Lake using Landsat time series images from 1984 to 2018. The area of aquatic vegetation in Gehu Lake (a large shallow lake in China) showed a significant decreasing trend (R2 = 0.839, p