Mapping seagrass beds and coral reefs in the coastal of Ninh Hai District, Ninh Thuan Province of Vietnam using Landsat 8 OLI image

Seagrass beds and coral reefs are play critical roles on the coastal zone ecosystem. Mapping those habitats is an importance for management, conservation and protection coastal zone ecosystem. In Vietnam, researches are normally using traditional method by go directly to the field and map in the laboratory by experience. This method is time consuming, need a lot of manpower and get unstable result. Using remote sensing data for mapping is one of the method to overcome the problems facing in traditional method. The objective in this study is using remote sensing data to map seagrass beds and coral reefs: A case study of using a LANDSAT 8 OLI image to map seagrass bed and coral reefs ecosystem of Ninh hai coast, Ninh thuan province of Vietnam. The image was processed through four steps: 1. Atmospheric correction; 2. Sun glint removal using Hedley proposed method; 3. Water column correction using depth-Invariant Index (DII) of Lyzenga; 4. Image classified using maximum likelihood method. The map result show a good overall accuracy of 70.97% and Kappa coefficient of 0.65. Total areas of seagrass beds is about 275.22(ha), located mainly in My Hoa and Thai An communities and the total areas of coral reefs is about 772.45(ha), located along the coast. This result provide a good signal on underwater habitats mapping for coastal zone management by using the free satellite of LANDSAT 8 OLI data. Promised an efficient tool for management and conservation underwater ecosystems in Vietnam.