SCIENCE@home

Characterizing and monitoring of mangroves in Malaysia using Landsat-based spatial-spectral variability

H. Omar,Muhamad Afizzul Misman,Valeria Linggok

Published 2018 in IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environment

ABSTRACT

Malaysia, which is one of the counties in South East Asia that has among the largest extents of mangroves. These mangroves have been providing important ecosystem goods and services to the environment and their surrounding societies including shoreline stabilization, storm protection, water quality maintenance, micro-climate stabilization, recreation, tourism, fishing and various forestry products. Despite its extensive distribution of mangrove ecosystem, this forest is inevitable from threats by various land use activities. Therefore, knowledge on mangroves distribution and change is importance for effective management and making protection policies. Although remote sensing has been widely used to characterize and monitor mangroves change over a range of spatial and temporal scales, studies on mangroves change in Malaysia is lacking. This study used Landsat images over the year 1990, 2000 and 2017 to identify, map and detect changes that have occurred in mangrove forest in Malaysia. Several image variables were used, such as individual bands from visible and near infrared wavelengths and several vegetation indices (VIs). The classification was performed by using RandomForest classifier in R environment, and the attained overall accuracy was greater than 90%. A number of ground thruth points were used to validate the classification products. It was found that Malaysia currently has about 630,000 ha of mangroves, where 61% found in Sabah, 22% in Sarawak and 17% in Peninsular Malaysia. The rate of mangroves deforestation was about 0.1% per year between 1990 and 2017. Most of the changes occurred mainly outside the Permanent Forest Reserve and according to the States’ structural planning. Expanding agricultural lands for plantations and aquaculture industries were the most prominent factors of mangroves deforestation. Other conversions involved expansion of settlement and industrial areas, while factors such as local consumption of mangrove stands for fuelwoods and coastal erosion are found as minor causes.

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-24 of 24 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-17 of 17 citing papers · Page 1 of 1