Assessment of mangrove forest damage and its recovery in Banda Aceh city post-tsunami disaster

The Indian Ocean Tsunami on 26th December 2004, had caused devastation on land and coastal ecosystems. One of the worst affected ecosystems is the mangrove forest. Many areas of mangrove forest have been destroyed, and it may pose a long-term impact for the region, both in terms of forest and biodiversity conservation and in terms of the ability of the ecosystem to support the livelihoods of the coastal communities. The tragedy of tsunami has requested the rationale for conserving and sustainably managing natural ecosystems among the researchers and scientific community. The research was carried out to make a post-tsunami damage assessment and recovery of mangrove forest in Banda Aceh city area. Several high-resolution satellite imageries data have been effectively used to detect, assess and monitor the changes of mangrove forests in the pre and post-tsunami period using multi-temporal optical satellite data. An on-screen visual interpretation was made to identify the heterogeneous patches for the preliminary classification of fieldwork. A supervised classification was performed to obtain the pre and post Tsunami assessment maps. Accuracy assessment of the classified maps was performed on pixel-level using ground truth. The result highlighted the changes in the spatial extent of the mangrove forests in the study area as a result of Tsunami disaster. The latest condition of the mangrove forest recovery is about 90.3% of the total damage area.