Impact Analysis of Coastal Engineering Projects on Mangrove Wetland Area Change with Remote Sensing

In the past decades, two large scale coastal engineering projects have been carried out in the Deep Bay surrounded by Shenzhen City and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. One project is Shenzhen River channel regulation and the other is the sea reclamation along the seashore on the Shenzhen side. The two projects are very close to the two national nature reserves, specifically Futian in Shenzhen and Mai Po in Hong Kong, which are important wetland ecosystems worldwide. This paper aims to identify and monitor the mangrove wetland changes with time series of Landsat Thematic Mapper images pre and post to the two engineering projects being launched. Coupled analysis of the image interpretation results and tidal data acquired at the same time in the context of the two works reveals that the mangrove wetland area has increased from year 1989 to 1994, and has changed little from year 1994 to 2002. Binary coding is applied to reveal the distribution image of mangrove at each phase, and the coding image shows that the construction of the two coastal engineering projects has caused frequent changes in mangrove spatial distribution. The study also shows that the change is not significant regarding to the precision of the method and the natural evolution of mangrove wetland, and the projects do not cause apparently influences upon the two national mangrove conservation zones at least for the research time period.