Monitoring of Mangrove Cover of Western Indus Delta Karachi Pakistan

Abstract

The coastline of Pakistan comprises of five significant sites comprising of mangroves including Indus Delta which contains extensive mangroves zones and termed as the largest arid mangrove found globally. This study evaluate the current extent of mangroves along the Western edge of Indus Delta and provide the most recent forest cover assessment of mangroves. Moreover, this study identifies the changes occurred in forest cover from the years 2000 to 2020. Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM), 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Landsat 7 ETM data were used for mangroves mapping through supervised classification method. The results displayed that total area of mangrove forest cover was nearly 279.094km², 395.77km², 306.58km² in the years 2000, 2010 and 2020 respectively. This study indicates an increase in area of mangrove cover from 29% to 41% from the year 2000 to 2010. Regeneration of mangrove mostly took place around the southern region of the Indus Delta. The mangrove specie has decreased from 41% to 31% from the year 2010 to 2020. The major causes of this reduction were urban water and industrial pollution, over-fishing in Indus delta, freshwater diversion for agriculture, and overharvesting of mangroves by the local communities, coastal erosion and sedimentation.