Assessment of habitat suitability for waterbirds in the West Songnen Plain, China, using remote sensing and GIS

In the past five decades, waterbirds habitats have been seriously damaged in the West Songnen Plain due to the continuous deterioration of wetland ecosystems. Identifying suitable habitats is critical to wetland management and restoration. In this study, by developing an object-oriented segmentation approach in conjunction with geographic information system (GIS) spatial analysis and remote sensing image data, we analyzed and assessed the suitability of habitat for waterbirds in the West Songnen Plain, China. Nesting locations were used to validate the precision. The results show that the area of good, fair, poor, and not suitable habitat for waterbirds is 216 x 10(3) ha, 329 x 10(3) ha, 109 x 10(3) ha, and 283 x 10(3) ha, respectively. Approximately 23.48% of the total area of the West Songnen Plain is good suitable habitat. The results also indicate the great potential of this approach for objectively and effectively evaluating habitat suitability for waterbirds. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.