Gap-Free Monitoring of Annual Mangrove Forest Dynamics in Ca Mau Province, Vietnamese Mekong Delta, Using the Landsat-7-8 Archives and Post-Classification Temporal Optimization

Remote Sensing

Joris Timmermans¹  LeonT. Hauser¹  Pham Viet Hoa²  Nguyen An Binh²  Nguyen Hong Quan³ 

[1] Department of Environmental Biology, Institute of Environmental Sciences, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9518, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands;Ho Chi Minh City Institute of Resources Geography, Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, Ho Chi Minh City 700000, Vietnam;Institute for Circular Economy Development, Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City 70000, Vietnam;

关键词: data fusion;    forest monitoring;    Google Earth Engine;    Landsat;    mangrove forests;    multi-temporal analysis;   

DOI  :  10.3390/rs12223729

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Ecosystem services offered by mangrove forests are facing severe risks, particularly through land use change driven by human development. Remote sensing has become a primary instrument to monitor the land use dynamics surrounding mangrove ecosystems. Where studies formerly relied on bi-temporal assessments of change, the practical limitations concerning data-availability and processing power are slowly disappearing with the onset of high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud-computing services, such as in the Google Earth Engine (GEE). This paper combines the capabilities of GEE, including its entire Landsat-7 and Landsat-8 archives and state-of-the-art classification approaches, with a post-classification temporal analysis to optimize land use classification results into gap-free and consistent information. The results demonstrate its application and value to uncover the spatio-temporal dynamics of mangrove forests and land use changes in Ngoc Hien District, Ca Mau province, Vietnamese Mekong delta. The combination of repeated GEE classification output and post-classification optimization provides valid spatial classification (94–96% accuracy) and temporal interpolation (87–92% accuracy). The findings reveal that the net change of mangroves forests over the 2001–2019 period equals −0.01% annually. The annual gap-free maps enable spatial identification of hotspots of mangrove forest changes, including deforestation and degradation. Post-classification temporal optimization allows for an exploitation of temporal patterns to synthesize and enhance independent classifications towards more robust gap-free spatial maps that are temporally consistent with logical land use transitions. The study contributes to a growing body of work advocating full exploitation of temporal information in optimizing land cover classification and demonstrates its use for mangrove forest monitoring.

【 授权许可】

Unknown