Mapping coastal & estuarine vegetation using VHR satellite imagery in St Lucia

Abstract

The iSimangaliso Wetland Park in which the St Lucia estuary is embedded hosts the largest estuarine system in Africa (155 000 Ha). Remote sensing mapping of the composition of the otherwise largely inaccessible estuarine vegetation provides a baseline for understanding and managing of estuarine environments. Within the presented project, we compared ecosystem and land cover classifications for the Greater St Lucia region derived from very high resolution (VHR) multispectral imagery from the RapidEye, WorldView-2 and SPOT-6 sensors with and without the additional use of LiDAR derived topographic data. As ground reference, a GIS-derived wetland classification based on site visits and aerial photos have been used. Results show that accuracies increase with higher spatial resolution, of both, the multispectral as well as the Li-DAR derived topographic data.