A Comparison of Soil Texture Distribution and Soil Moisture Mapping of Chennai Coast using Landsat ETM+ and IKONOS Data

• Published in: Aquatic procedia Vol. 4; pp. 1452 - 1460
• Main Authors: Lakshmi, S. Vidhya, James, Jijo, Soundariya, S., Vishalini, T., Pandian, P. Kasinatha
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 2015
• Subjects: beaches; coasts; image processing; India; land cover; Landsat; mositure content; particle size distribution; soil map; soil profiles; soil properties; Soil texture; soil water; statistical analysis; water content; India; image processing; Soil texture; soil map; mositure content
• ISSN: 2214-241X; 2214-241X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.aqpro.2015.02.188

The Chennai coastline is part of the Marina, the second longest urban beach in the world. This study does an initial description of coastal zone soil profile from filed observations, involving collection of surface soil samples from different points along the coast. The samples were lab tested to determine their grain size distribution and moisture content followed by a textural study. Statistical analysis was carried out to map grain size distribution along with the moisture content. The obtained results were used to extrapolate a soil properties map of the entire study area using a image classification method known as subpixel classification. For developing a map of the studied soil properties, a preprocessed image of LANDSAT ETM+ (spatial resolution of 30 m) and IKONOS (spatial resolution of 4 m) is used and were subject to spectral unmixing (the process of determination of percentage of several land cover within a single pixel).