Combining field and image spectral reflectance for mangrove species identification and mapping using WorldView-2 image

Abstract

Mangrove species inventory and mapping is very important as an effort to preserve the ecosystem and biodiversity of mangrove forests. One way of efficient mangrove species inventory and mapping is to use remote sensing imagery, especially through the analysis of its spectral reflectance pattern. This study aims to map the fourteen mangrove species on Karimunjawa Island, Central Java, Indonesia by: (1) measuring the mangrove species spectral reflectance pattern in the field, (2) characteristic analysis of the mangrove species reflectance pattern, and (3) mapping the dominant mangrove species distribution. The spectral reflectance measurement of mangrove species objects in the field was done by using JAZ EL-350 VIS-NIR (ranges from 300 to 1100 nm). The JAZ field spectrometer was pointed at a distance of 2 cm from the target objects with 10 reading repetitions for each species. Field measurements results were then taken to the laboratory for analysis of spectral reflectance and absorbance patterns, which served as key object recognition in this study. To combine the field and image spectral reflectance patterns, the field reflectance patterns were resampled to the spectral resolution of WorldView-2 image (8 bands, 2 m pixel size). The spectral angle mapper (SAM) method was the used to locate and map the distribution of each targeted mangrove species. As expected, the results showed that the largest difference of spectral curves between species was at the NIR wavelength spectrum (700-900nm). Hence, it is potential to be used as the basis for identification of species mangrove from remote sensing imagery. However, the result of this mapping approach only showed a low accuracy of 62%. The low value of map accuracy was attributed to the inaccuracy in defining threshold in SAM for each class. This study provides a basic understanding of the use of spectral reflectance for mangrove species mapping from remote sensing imagery.