Discrimination of mangrove species of Rhizophoraceae using laboratory spectral signatures

Mangroves are salt tolerant intertidal marine vegetation ecosystem which has many ecological and economic advantages towards society. Spectral signatures are like fingerprints which provide plethora of information about the object under observation especially about their biochemical and structural variation among plant species in the case of vegetation studies. This paper has an objective to determine potential wavelength locations in hyperspectral bands for the discrimination among eight mangrove species of Rhizophoraceae family using their laboratory spectral reflectance data. Parametric and non-parametric statistical analyses were used for the discriminant analysis using spectral signatures of eight species in four spectral modes - a) Reflectance Spectra (RS), b) Continuum Removed Reflectance Spectra (CRRS), c) Inverse Spectra (IS) and d) Continuum Removed Inverse Spectra (CRIS). Results have shown that red edge region is found to be the most consistent wavelength location to discriminate species. Non-parametric statistical analysis has given better results in discriminating the species in all the four modes.