Optical Characteristics of Landscape Features Asinformational Resource for Solving Onshore Oil and Gasexploration Tasks With Remote Sensing Data

The article looks into the possibility of using optical characteristics of landscape features (plants and soils) to deal with onshore oil and gas exploration tasks. Further growth of oil and gas reserves in the Dnieper-Donets basin is known to be linked to small- sized traps of the combined type, which are hard to detect and require significant time scopes. Therefore, it calls for urgency to develop new unconventional methods that would allow for not only predicting traps, but also providing an assessment of their productivity, followed by prospecting and exploration, including remote and ground-based spectral measurements of plants and soils. Based on the analysis of complex geophysical and geochemical factors of the environment above the hydrocarbon depos- its, which determine the change in the optical characteristics of the vegetation cover, and taking into account the materials of foreign and domestic authors, as well as the results of the own research, we propose a conceptual model for formation of optical anomalies of landscapes above hydrocarbon deposits. Also, we provide a list of oil and gas prospecting and exploration tasks that are already being solved successfully with the help of remote and ground-based spectral measurements of vegetation cover. The final information product of the application of optical anomalies in plants and soils is a map with the distribution of probabilistic estimates of the oil and gas occurrence of subsoil resources within the given research territory.