• Ecology and Resilient Infrastructure
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.59-71
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• 2018

Lake Enriquillo, the largest lake in the Dominican Republic, recently has undergone unusual water area changes since 2001 thus it has been affected seriously by local community's livelihood. Earthquakes and seismic activities of Hispaniola plate tectonic coupled with human activities and climate change are addressed as factors causing the increasing. Thus, a thorough study on relationship between lake area changing, and those factors is needed urgently. To do so, this study applied MESMA on MODIS data to extract water area of Lake Enriquillo during 2001 and 2012 bimonthly, with six issues 12-year. MODIS provides high temporal resolution, and its coarse spatial resolution is compensated by MESMA fraction map. The increase in water area was $142.2km^2$, and the maximum lake area was $338.0km^2$ (in 2012). Water areas extracted by two Landsat scenes at two different times with three image classification approaches (ISODATA, MNDWI, and TCW) were used to assess accuracy of MODIS and MESMA results; it indicated that MESMA water areas are same as ISODATA's, less than 0.4%, while the highest difference is between MESMA and TCW, 2.4%. A number of previously formulated hypotheses of lake area change were investigated based on the outcomes of the present study, though none of them could fully explain the changes.