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Quantifying Tropical Wetlands Using Field Surveys, Spatial Statistics and Remote Sensing

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Abstract

Tropical wetlands support high biodiversity and ecological services, but in most areas they suffer from a paucity of baseline data to support management. We demonstrate how modern technology can be used to develop ecological baseline data including, landuse/landcover, water depth, water quality, lake-level fluctuation, and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). For the first time we quantified and mapped these metrics for the Paya Indah Wetlands, Malaysia using the new high-spatial-resolution World View 2 imagery. Landuse/landcover classifications were validated by field visits and visual interpretation of the imagery. NDVI was extracted based on red and near infra-red 2 bands. Topo to Raster method was used for interpolation of water depths. Annual mean of a water-quality index and annual water-level fluctuation of lakes were interpolated across lakes using the inverse-distance weighting method. Qualitative and quantitative accuracy assessment of classification (75 % overall accuracy, user’s accuracies ranged from 60 % to 90 % and producer’s accuracy ranged from 60 % to 97 %) was promising and clearly illustrated that World View 2 imagery can yield fast and reasonably precise identification of ecosystem characteristics for ecological baselines.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the Malaysian governmental agencies, NAHRIM and DWNP for providing data and allowing us to conduct this research. We thank Paya Indah wetlands reserve guards and staff for their help during field surveys. We also thank Department of Biological Science, University of Alberta and Faculty of Forestry, Universiti Putra Malaysia staff and students for their support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Abdollah Salari, Charlene C. Nielsen & Mark S. Boyce

  2. Department of Park and Ecotourism, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia

    Abdollah Salari & Mohamed Zakaria

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  1. Abdollah Salari
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  2. Mohamed Zakaria
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  3. Charlene C. Nielsen
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  4. Mark S. Boyce
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Correspondence to Abdollah Salari.

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Salari, A., Zakaria, M., Nielsen, C.C. et al. Quantifying Tropical Wetlands Using Field Surveys, Spatial Statistics and Remote Sensing. Wetlands 34, 565–574 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-014-0524-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-014-0524-3

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