Mapping Coral Reef Condition in Phi Phi Island, Thailand using Image Fusion and Mahalanobis Distance Classifier.

要旨

Coral reefs are the most complex and diverse marine ecosystem. These are very important in the content of Thailand owing to their demand as attractive tourist places for the variety of corals and fishes. This work relates to using of digitally fused images of high spatial resolution Panchromatic and multispectral, LISS III sensors of IRS-1D, for extraction of complex benthic habitat community map. This study employed the standard method of Reef Check organization, which is used by volunteer around the world, for the purpose of ground truth of coral reefs. Water column correction was used to eliminate the influence of the depth before supervised classification using ten classes from multivariate classification of field survey for training area. The outcome of the model was a habitat map depicting various components including the desired information on status and quality of coral reef. The rule for identification of habitat zone map was done by the ratio of percent age cover of live coral and dead coral followed by the standard rule of Coral reefs maps in Thai water made by Phuket Marine Biological Center (PMBC). In the study area, four zones of the reef habitats, except in "Good zone" and "Damaged zone", are explored from the remote sensing data processing techniques and modeling.