Identifying mangrove species and their surrounding land use and land cover classes using an object-oriented approach with a lacunarity spatial measure

Accurate and reliable information on the spatial distribution of mangrove species is needed for a wide variety of applications, including sustainable management of mangrove forests, conservation and reserve planning, ecological and biogeographical studies, and invasive species management. Remotely sensed data have been used for such purposes with mixed results. Our study employed an object-oriented approach with the use of a lacunarity technique to identify different mangrove species and their surrounding land use and land cover classes in a tsunami-affected area of Thailand using Landsat satellite data. Our results showed that the object-oriented approach with lacunarity-transformed bands is more accurate (overall accuracy 94.2%; kappa coefficient = 0.91) than traditional per-pixel classifiers (overall accuracy 62.8%; and kappa coefficient = 0.57).