AbstractsGeography &GIS

Coastal squeeze is defined as the reduction in the space of coastal habitats to operate [1] and it is an important cause for (amongst others) coastline retreat, an increase in flood risk and salinity intrusion. Land use changes, such as deforestation and urbanization, reduce the space of natural habitats such as mangrove forests. This causes a deterioration of these habitats, which leads to a reduction of their natural protective and provisioning functions. Costs related to these function losses can be avoided by early recognition of coastal squeeze and early action against it. The coastal zone inMyanmar is subject to urbanization, extreme weather conditions (cyclones), increase in agri- and aquaculture and (illegal) felling of mangroves. TU Delft and partners are developing a research proposal in order to investigate the occurrence of coastal squeeze in Myanmar and to use this knowledge to develop a decision making tool that can operate within an integrated coastal zone management strategy. Our research is a scoping study to investigate how remote sensing analysis (using freely available Landsat imagery) can contribute to early recognition of coastal squeeze. This is applied on a case study of the lower Ayeyarwady delta in Myanmar, a crucial agricultural zone nicknamed the ‘Rice Bowl of Myanmar’. Analysis of Landsat imagery has been done to create a series of land use maps and determine coastline changes. This analysis has led to varying results. The use of recent Landsat imagery combined with data gathered by fieldwork has promising results to accurately calculate land use for large areas. Unfortunately this technique loses accuracy rapidly when applied to imagery from the past. Causes are the quality of the imagery (Landsat in general and the used techniques to obtain surface reflection images), the quality of the algorithm used for the classification and the quality and quantity of our ground truth data set. Extraction of the coastline for the past 30 years has been done with a reasonable accuracy of § 60 meters. Trends of coastline retrogradation and/or progradation along the coast of the delta have been identified and are presented in a map. Another output of this scoping study is an indicative map that identifies coastline types along the Ayeyarwady delta coastline.