The use of airborne remote sensing for extensive mapping of intertidal sediments and saltmarshes in eastern England

Abstract

Airborne remote sensing with a Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imager (CASI) and a Daedalus Airborne Thematic Mapper (ATM) has been used to map sediment types and biotic associations for the intertidal zone along 270 km of coastline from the Humber Estuary to North Norfolk, UK within the LOIS BIOTA (Land-Ocean Interaction Study, Biological Influences On interTidal Areas) programme. This allows field-based biotic and sedimentary information to be extrapolated to provide information for modelling the coastal processes of erosion and accretion. The method adopted for image classification was unsupervised clustering which was used to map an extensive area (476 km 2 ) of the exposed intertidal zone at a spatial resolution of 5 2 5 m pixels. Ten broad classes of intertidal sediments and vegetation have been mapped with approximately 70% correspondence with ground data.