Estimation of the Aerial Cover of Seagrasses of Lakshadweep Islands (India) Using Indian Remote Sensing Satellite (IRS P
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Estimation of the Aerial Cover of Seagrasses of Lakshadweep Islands (India) Using Indian Remote Sensing Satellite (IRS P6 LISS IV) E. P. Nobi & E. Dilipan & K. Sivakumar & T. Thangaradjou Received: 13 May 2011 / Accepted: 14 October 2011 / Published online: 8 December 2011 # Indian Society of Remote Sensing 2011
Abstract Seagrasses ecosystems are fragile yet highly productive ecosystems of the world showing declining trend throughout the world due to natural and anthropogenic pressures. Effective conservation and management plan is thus required to protect these resources, to aid with conservation need mapping and monitoring of seagrasses using high resolution remote sensing data is very much required. Hence, the present study was made to record the seagrass aerial cover in the Lakshadweep islands using IRS P6 LISS IV satellite data. The suitability of LISS IV sensor for seagrass mapping was tested for the first time with an overall accuracy of 73.16%. The study found an area of 2590.2 ha of seagrasses in Lakshadweep islands with 1310.8 ha and 1279.4 ha dense and sparse seagrass cover respectively. The study recommends the use of LISS IV data for mapping the shallow water seagrasses, as mapping efficiency increases nearly 4 times more than the LISS III data, as the former (LISS IV) picks up the small patches of seagrasses and delineates the coral and reef vegetation patches from seagrass class. E. P. Nobi : E. Dilipan : K. Sivakumar : T. Thangaradjou (*) Centre of Advanced Study in Marine Biology, Faculty of Marine Sciences, Annamalai University, Parangipettai 608 502 Tamilnadu, India e-mail: [email protected] Present Address: E. P. Nobi Climate Change Informatics, CSIR- National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources, Dr K S Krishnan Marg, Pusa Campus, New Delhi 110 012 Tamilnadu, India
Keywords Remote sensing . IRS P6 LISS IV . Spatial resolution . Seagrass . Lagoon . Lakshadweep
Introduction Seagrasses represent one of the important and highly productive ecosystems of the world, which supports a variety of life forms ranging from microbes to marine mammals like dugongs (Thangaradjou et al. 2008). Seagrass habitats have valuable roles as they function as nursery grounds and repositories of natural resources, in addition to giving biodiversity and coastal protection (Waycott et al. 2005). This ecosystem is facing severe threats from natural and anthropogenic stresses all over the world and considerable decrease in the seagrass areas has also been reported (Waycott et al. 2009). Effective management plan is therefore required to conserve these ecosystems and the major part of the management would be the appropriate monitoring of seagrass biophysical characters, species composition, seagrass area cover and biomass (Armstrong 1993; Short et al. 2001; Larkum et al. 2006). Remote sensing and GIS techniques have been widely used in mapping and monitoring the coral reefs and mangroves but only little importance has been given for assessing the equally important seagrass resource
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