Quantifying tropical wetlands using field surveys, spatial statistics and remote sensing

• Main Authors: Salari, Abdollah, Hussin, Mohamed Zakaria, Nielsen, Charlene C., Boyce, Mark S.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Springer 2014
• Online Access: http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/35135/1/Quantifying%20tropical%20wetlands%20using%20field%20surveys.pdf; http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/35135/; http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13157-014-0524-3

Tropical wetlands support high biodiversity and ecological services, but in most areas they suffer from a paucity of baseline data to support management. We demonstrate how modern technology can be used to develop ecological baseline data including, landuse/landcover, water depth, water quality, lake-level fluctuation, and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). For the first time we quantified and mapped these metrics for the Paya Indah Wetlands, Malaysia using the new high-spatial-resolution World View 2 imagery. Landuse/landcover classifications were validated by field visits and visual interpretation of the imagery. NDVI was extracted based on red and near infra-red 2 bands. Topo to Raster method was used for interpolation of water depths. Annual mean of a water-quality index and annual water-level fluctuation of lakes were interpolated across lakes using the inverse-distance weighting method. Qualitative and quantitative accuracy assessment of classification (75 % overall accuracy, user’s accuracies ranged from 60 % to 90 % and producer’s accuracy ranged from 60 % to 97 %) was promising and clearly illustrated that World View 2 imagery can yield fast and reasonably precise identification of ecosystem characteristics for ecological baselines.