Mangroves in Gulf of Khambhat, Gujarat: a case study

Abstract

The present study is mainly focused on studying the mangroves in the Gulf of Khambhat and exploring the previous research work done over the area for mapping and monitoring of mangrove ecosystem, which will further help to analyze the future scope of mangrove research in this area. To study the status and distribution of mangroves in the Gulf of the Khambhat region, mainly three ground truth locations are selected to collect ground truth data, which are Ghogha (Bhavanagar), Dahej (Bharuch), and Kantiyajal (Bharuch). All three locations are analyzed for the study of the mangroves and their species distribution. Furthermore, the Land Use / Land Cover change in all three areas is also analyzed to find mangrove cover change. The resultant data can be further used for training mangrove monitoring models using remote sensing data. The study also highlights that the current research done over the gulf of Khambhat area is not using the full strength of remote sensing as only multispectral optical imageries are used in various studies along with visual interpretation techniques. The study highly recommends the use of remote sensing with multi-sensor, multitemporal along with state-of-the-art machine learning and computer vision-based techniques for the mapping and monitoring of the Mangrove ecosystem in the Gulf of Khambhat region.