Satellite imagery offers great potential for marine coastal areas mapping and spatio-temporal dynamics assessment. Due to climate and anthropogenic-induced changes on coastal zone morphology as well as on stocks of plankton and fish, climate–sea interactions and their response on marine ecosystems have recently been focus of considerable attention. Fuzzy theory applied for the analysis of coastal areas changes, for which each pixel on the map is assigned a membership grade in all classes, represent reasonable alternatives to traditional fixed classifications. Fuzzy classifications and mixture/subpixel models provide information on variations in spectral signature between pixels and not on differences in the on-the-ground content of mapped land cover. The coastal zone units are recognized on a ground truth map of an area using Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM) as well as IKONOS and Quickbird imagery for North-Western Black Sea coastal zone, Romania, over 1990-2011 period. The application of fuzzy logic for quantifying magnitudes of land cover changes is highly appealing because of its capability to deal with uncertainties such as in the case when one cannot accurately identify a threshold value to separate areas of change from areas of no-change. Anthropogenic eutrophication and coastal erosion affects the Romanian North-Western Black Sea to various extents.

Date Published: 19 October 2012
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 8531, Remote Sensing for Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Hydrology XIV, 85311W (19 October 2012); doi: 10.1117/12.974392

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8531:
Remote Sensing for Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Hydrology XIV
Christopher M. U. Neale; Antonino Maltese, Editor(s)