Assessment of water body change and sedimentation rate in Moulay Bousselham wetland, Morocco, using geospatial technologies

Abstract

Coastal lagoons have significant biodiversity and ecologic and socio-economic interest. Several resident and migratory birds live in coastal lagoons as well as fish and other aquatic biota. Over the years, lagoons worldwide have been subject to considerable sediment deposition coming especially from soil erosion due of agricultural activities, and the lagoon׳s inflows have resulted in an accelerated sedimentation which can drastically affect the aquatic ecosystem balance. A new, fast, and cost-effective approach was developed, using water surface change as a proxy, to evaluate the sediment deposition rate. In the current research, this methodology was applied in the Moulay Bousselham Lagoon in Morocco, and a combination of Landsat 8 and Landsat 5 imagery acquired at four points in time over 30 years (1985–2015) was used. Following geometric correction and enhancement, the interpretation of the acquired images provided important insight on the current conditions of the water surface change using the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI). Several iterations were done to determine a suitable threshold for effective water surface detection. In order to validate the automatically extracted water surface features, many band combinations of Landsat and Sentinel 2 were used as references to run the accuracy assessment. The results show that the Moulay Bousselham Lagoon lost 17.60% (106 ha) of its water surface area, and 530,000 m3 to 1,060,000 m3 of its water volume during the last three decades. Converting water surface loss into sedimentation returned a rate of 0.58 cm/yr. These results have been confirmed by previous field work using sedimentological approaches. Proper management should be applied to sustain the vitality of this lagoon environment.