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3 - Satellite Remote Sensing for the Conservation of East Asia’s Coastal Wetlands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 July 2018

By
Nicholas J. Murray
Edited by
Allison K. Leidner  and
Graeme M. Buchanan
Allison K. Leidner
Affiliation:
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Washington DC
Graeme M. Buchanan
Affiliation:
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), Edinburgh
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Summary

The use of remote sensing for assessing long-term changes of wetlands has provided essential information on the distribution and status of wetlands around the world. High resolution global maps of wetland extent now include water cover, water bodies, mangroves and many other wetland types. Yet our knowledge of the distribution and extent of tidal flats, a fringing ecosystem that occurs between land and sea, remains surprisingly poor. The process of regular tidal inundation renders tidal flats fully exposed only at low tide and completely unobservable at high tide, which has severely limited our ability to observe tidal flats with satellites. Therefore, fundamental information such as the global distribution of tidal flats and how they have changed over time remains largely unknown at anything other than local scales. This chapter introduces a satellite remote sensing project that overcame this limitation to develop high resolution maps of the intertidal zone using the full Landsat Archive images. The project was initiated to contribute to solving a fundamental conservation problem: identifying the cause of the ongoing collapse of migratory shorebird populations in the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. This migration is one of the world’s largest bird movements, involving millions of individuals. By developing a time series of tidal flat extent in the Yellow Sea region of East Asia, a critical staging site for millions of migratory shorebirds, we discovered that more than two-thirds of tidal flats had disappeared over a 50 year period. The high-resolution maps and the detection of alarmingly high rates of habitat loss have catalysed a range of conservation actions since 2012, demonstrating that data gathered with satellite remote sensing can have significant and lasting influence on conservation actions.
Type
Chapter
Information
Satellite Remote Sensing for Conservation Action
Case Studies from Aquatic and Terrestrial Ecosystems
 , pp. 54 - 81
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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