Evaluating resampled and fused Sentinel-2 data and machine-learning algorithms for mangrove mapping in the northern coast of Qeshm island, Iran

Mangrove forests, as an essential component of the coastal zones in tropical and subtropical areas, provide a wide range of goods and ecosystem services that play a vital role in ecology. Mangroves are globally threatened, disappearing, and degraded. Consequently, knowledge on mangroves distribution and change is important for effective conservation and making protection policies. Developing remote sensing data and classification methods have proven to be suitable tools for mapping mangrove forests over a regional scale. Here, we scrutinized and compared the performance of pixel-based and object-based methods under Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) algorithms in mapping a mangrove ecosystem into four main classes (Mangrove tree, mudflat, water, and sand spit) using resampled and fused Sentinel-2 images. Additionally, landscape metrics were used to identify the differences between spatial patterns obtained from different classification methods. Results showed that pixel-based classifications were influenced heavily by the effect of salt and pepper noise, whereas in object-based classifications, boundaries of land use land cover (LULC) polygons were smoother and visually more appealing. Object-based classifications, with an excellent level of kappa, distinguished mudflat and sand spit from each other and from mangrove better than the pixel-based classifications which obtained a fair-to-good level of kappa. RF and SVM performed differently under comparable circumstances. The results of landscape metrics comparison presented that the classification methods can be affected on quantifying area and size metrics. Although the results supported the idea that fused Sentinel images may provide better results in mangrove LULC classification, further research needs to develop and evaluate various image fusion approaches to make use of all Sentinel’s fine resolution images. Our results on the mapping of mangrove ecosystems can contribute to the improvement of management and conservation strategies for these ecosystems being impacted by human activities.