Monitoring i-lan coastal zone using multi-temporal Formosat-2 images

Abstract

Coastal sand dunes are dynamic and fragile terrain often regarded as environmentally sensitive areas. The coastal zone environment is easily affected by many natural and man-made factors, especially improper land use that result in rapid disappearance of coastal sand dunes. In this paper, by using three Formosat-2 images acquired between 2005 and 2008 and supervised classification methods, the change detection analysis of sand dunes and land use show temporal and spatial variability in the costal zone of I-Lan Plain. Based on the result of image classification, the land use/land cover changes and spatial variability were analyzed by using Fragstats, a public domain software for spatial pattern analysis. The objectives of this research include: (1) analyzing spatial variability of land-use and sand dunes area by landscape metrics; (2) testing differences of study area between two periods by Shannon t-test ; (3) building a Markov model to predict land-use/land-cover area for the next 15 years. The result of this study showed that water and built-up areas increases between 2005 and 2008. According to the comparisons of landscape indices and Shannon t-test results, the landscape structure of the study area during 2005 and 2008 had significant changes. Based on the simulation of the land-cover changes between 2005 and 2020, water body and built-up areas will increase, and the other land-use types (sandy area/cropland/forest) areas will decrease. Copyright © (2009) by the Asian Association on Remote Sensing.