Landscape change analysis before and after the earthquake disaster in Sendai coastal area by using SPOT satellite data

Abstract

The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in March 2011, has resulted in an unprecedented and immense damage in and around Sendai coastal region. In the cause of recovery and conservation in the region, evaluation on the status due to the disaster as well as the land-cover change over a broad scale became an important issue. Accordingly, revealing its influences quantitatively was set as our goal in this paper. Based on landcover classification map from two SPOT HRG-2 photographs (October 2010 and November 2011), landscape characteristics such as patch area and landscape heterogeneity were indexed for revealing landscape change before and after the disaster. As the result, forest along the coast (4.2km² to 0.5km²)almost 90 percent were collapsed. Paddy area, due to the wide scale immersion, had also decreased from 15.8km² to 0.1km² and became uncultivable mostly in the first year after the disaster. Otherwise, with increased fragmentation on the large dominated patches, landscape pattern of the area became more heterogeneous and configured by a densely distributed small size patches.