DETECTION OF OIL POLLUTION ALONG THE PIPELINE ROUTES IN TROPICAL ECOSYSTEM FROM MULTI-SPECTRAL DATA

摘要

The study was conducted in an oil producing environment dominated by mangrove and swamp vegetation in Niger Delta, Nigeria. Ancillary data including oil pipeline map and GPS of spill points were used in selecting sample sites to identify and detect polluted locations. A number of polluted and non-polluted sites were selected and vegetation spectral reflectance and indices for these sample sites were extracted from TM data of January and December 1986. A statistical T-test was used to test for significant differences between vegetation spectral reflectance and indices from polluted and non-polluted sites. The initial results from the analysis of spectral reflectance between polluted and non-polluted did not show any significant difference in all the six spectral bands with p-value ＞0.005. The results from analysis of various vegetation indices some did not show any significance differences between the polluted and non-polluted sites (e.g. the SRI, SAVI and EVE). Other VIs (NDVI, MSAVI2 and ARVI2) showed significant differences between the polluted and non-polluted sites. From these preliminary results we can conclude that pollution from oil spills may result to the changes in leaf biochemistry of the Mangroves in the Niger Delta which are detectable from remote sensing data. Future work will focus on undertaking further temporal analysis of additional spill sites to determine what quantity of spilt oil arises in spectral changes of vegetation.