Monitoring Mangrove Forests Changes Using Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) in Delta Tumpat, Kelantan.

Mangrove forest are a crucial part in our ecosystem where it sustained many aqua species by becoming their habitat. Other than that, mangrove forest also act as the natural barrier towards the tidal waves comes from the open ocean. Delta Tumpat, Kelantan is consisted of mangrove forest where the forests are distributed in few patches of islands. Following the flood back in 2014 where it was recorded as one of the worst flood in history, the current status of Delta Tumpat had not been updated and this research is aimed to determine the mangrove forest changes with the aid of Remote Sensing and GIS. Previously, Remote Sensing and GIS had been said to be the most excellent pair particularly to identify wetlands. In this study, two software which are AcrMap and ENVI were used for image processing. Five islands were chosen as the study area which are Bedal A, Bedal B, Layang — Layang, Emas and Kambing Islands. The satellite images used was Landsat Image of year 2010 and year 2016. This is to compare data in both years to detect the changes. The acquired satellite images undergone pre-processing before being layered with NDVI and Supervised Classification. Then, the images were further classified into two classes of vegetation and non-vegetation area where field verification and accuracy assessment were done. The data was presented in two groups; vegetation area and non-vegetation area. After further analysis of all data, the vegetation covers had increase from 137.7 ha to 207.6 ha while non-vegetation covers decreased from 205.3 ha to 157.4 ha respectively from 2013 to 2016. The vegetation area increases as much as 13.4% while the non-vegetation area decreases 19.4% from year 2013 to 2016.