Mangrove Vegetation Mapping Using Sentinel-2A Imagery Based on Google Earth Engine Cloud Computing Platform

Abstract

Mangroves are trees whose habitat is affected by tides, and their presence has decreased from year to year. Today, mapping technology has undergone many developments, including the availability of images of various resolutions and cloud-based image processing. One of the popular platforms today is the Google Earth Engine. Google Earth Engine is a cloud-based platform that makes it easy to access high-performance computing resources for extensive processing. The advantage of using Google Earth Engine is that users do not have to be IT experts without experts in application development, WEB programming, and HTML. This study aims to conduct a study on mangrove mapping in Gili Genting District with Sentinel-2A imagery using a Google Earth Engine. This location was chosen since there are still many mangroves, especially on the Gili Raja and Gili Genting Islands. From this research, it can be concluded that cloud computing-based Sentinel-2A image processing shows that the vegetation value of NDVI results ranges from -0.923208 to 0.75579. The classification results show that mangrove forests' overall presence on Gili Genting Island is more expansive than Gili Raja Island with 16.74 ha and 14.75 ha. The use of the Google Earth Engine platform simplifies the analysis process because image processing can be done once with various scripts so that analysis becomes faster.