| Popis: |
Vegetation of the coastline plays a crucial part, as plants are the stabilizer of sand dunes that anticipate the disintegration of coast. The natural vegetation at the coast devastatingly reduces, because of the urban sprawling and overutilization of land resources. The assessment of vegetation through Geographical Information System and Remote Sensing (GIS and RS) at the coastal areas of Karachi has not been deeply studied yet. The main aim of the study was to mapped the identified halophytes (salt tolerant plants) based on ground survey through Nikon Coolpix built-in GPS camera and Change Detection (CD) analysis of the study area from of Landsat images from 1989-2018 by using NDVI. Approximately, thirty different species has been identified through geo-tagged images. The obtained results revealed that the CD analysis confirmed that the remarkable variation observed in vegetation distribution, which might be depends largely upon the amount of downpour. Moreover, the study area of 1989 was 133.78 km2 which coverage vegetative proportion about 12.58 km2, while increased up to 141.3 km² in 2018 and vegetation coverage increases by 15.4km². Overall, the vegetation coverage was observed highest 21.7km² during 1994. Prominently mangroves increase at the mouth of Liyari River which was the major source of sewerage water, directly dumped into Arabian Sea. It’s not easy to detect halophytes through Landsat images (30m resolution), Hyperspectral data is mandatory for the study of halophytes as most of them are grasses, herbs and shrubs. |
