REMOTE SENSING ANALYSIS ON ECOSYSTEM EVOLUTION OF THE IRRAWADDY RIVER DELTA

The Irrawaddy River is the largest river in Myanmar with its river delta as the country's agricultural center. It is of great significance to investigate river channel erosion and ecosystem evolution in such a river delta based on remote sensing. Thus, its river channel erosion/deposition and ecosystem evolution from 1970s to 2011 were analyzed based on Landsat and HJ satellite data through object-oriented supervised classification with the NDVI and NDWI threshold segmentation methods were used. The results show that river channel of Irrawaddy River from Burma Aung to the estuary delta hardly changes in 34 years while area of the estuary shoal is increasing slowly. An overall trend of continuously enlargement of cultivated land and urban land is found in the delta area with a gradually reduced forest land and wet land.