Abstract
Monitoring and understanding the changes in mangrove ecosystems and their surroundings are required to determine how mangrove ecosystems are constantly changing while influenced by anthropogenic, and natural drivers. Cosistency in high spatial resolution (30 m) satellite and high performance computing facilities are limiting factors to the process, with storage and analysis requirements. With this, we present the Google Earth Engine (GEE) based approach for long term mapping of mangrove forests and their surroundings. In this study, we used a GEE based approach: 1) to create atmospheric contamination free data from 1987-2017 from different Landsat satellite imagery; and 2) evaluating the random forest classifier and post classification change detection method. The obtained overall accuracy for the years 1987 and 2017 was determined to be 0.87 and 0.96, followed by a Kappa coefficient 0.80 and 0.94. The change detection results revealed a significant decrease in the agricultural area, while there was an increase in mangrove forest, shrimp/fish farm, and bareland area. The results suggest that interconversion of land use and land cover is affecting the landscape dynamics within the study area.
Highlights
Mangrove forests are located throughout the tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world, and are claimed to be one of the most vulnerable ecosystems to be affected by natural disturbances and human interference [1] [2] [3] [4]
The change detection results revealed a significant decrease in the agricultural area, while there was an increase in mangrove forest, shrimp/fish farm, and bareland area
This paper presents a new strategy in attempting to achieve error free 30 year annual composites of Landsat satellites imagery for mapping mangroves and their surrounding land use and land cover (LULC) changes on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud computing platform
Summary
Mangrove forests are located throughout the tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world, and are claimed to be one of the most vulnerable ecosystems to be affected by natural disturbances and human interference [1] [2] [3] [4]. Mangrove forests are unique ecosystems that provide important ecological services for coastal habitat and coastal protection [5] [6]. These ecosystems, are under high pressure due to over exploitation, and are declining at an alarming rate [2] [6]. Despite this rapid decline, and their importance, mangrove forest ecosystems have not received much publicity, in regard to conservation and rehabilitation [6] [7]. Satellite remote sensing has a great potential for mapping and monitoring changes in mangrove forests, as the space based technology allows for collecting information from the landscape which is otherwise difficult to access [9] [10]
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