The 2022 Russia’s full-scale military invasion, particularly the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Dam destruction in June 2023, significantly disrupted Ukraine’s Ramsar sites, which are significant for biodiversity and ecosystem services. Further effective restoration and management of Ukraine’s Ramsar wetlands require a proper assessment of the war-induced damage and their current extent. For that purpose, remote sensing offers great potential to support cost-effective and large-scale monitoring. Thus, the study proposes an approach to assess war-induced changes in Ukrainian Ramsar sites using satellite-derived surface water occurrence data. As the primary data source, we selected the Dynamic World dataset. This approach implies obtaining the surface water occurrence map, which could be divided into three classes: Permanent water, Temporary water, and No Water. The developed approach was applied to three Ramsar sites—Archipelago Velyki and Mali Kuchugury, Sim Maiakiv Floodplain, and Dnipro River Delta across two periods: pre-damage (June 2022–June 2023) and post-damage (June 2024–June 2025), after conditions stabilized following the Kakhovka Dam destruction. The obtained results demonstrated significant drying in upstream sites: Permanent Water in the Archipelago dropped from 82.76% to 6.04%, and in Sim Maiakiv Floodplain from 92.59% to 0.14. The downstream Dnipro River Delta was nearly unchanged, namely Permanent water (from 38.65% to 39.63%), Temporary water (from 8.34% to 10.58%), and No Water (from 53.02% to 49.79%). Thus, this study demonstrated that the Dam destruction caused significant changes for the selected Ramsar sites. Further, this approach could be applied to other Ramsar sites to enhance monitoring and restoration efforts.
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