Residential development and wetland fragmentation in Indonesia: A case study of Surabaya and its surrounding

The relationship between the way wetland is spatially fragmented and its impact on the local ecosystem is an ongoing concern. While fragmentation serves the practical and logistic need of development it breaks the contiguity that is needed to maintain the ecological equilibrium and habitats of the sensitive ecosystem that wetland is. This study describes and evaluates the spatial fragmentation of Surabaya’s wetland resulting from recent residential development, in particular, (1) the spatial composition and configuration of wetland use based on multi-temporal geospatial data, (2) the spatial fragmentation as a result of changes in the structure and pattern of wetlands use in Surabaya and its surroundings, and (3) data and visual modellings of the spatial fragmentation of wetlands. The research on wetland ecosystems pertained to three landform units i.e. fluvial (F), fluvio-marine (FM) and marine (M) in three different administrative regions i.e. Gresik, Surabaya, and Sidoarjo. The study utilised exploratory geospatial data from various analog and digital forms of multitemporal and multi-resolution. These geospatial data were grouped into four time periods: (a) before 1965, (b) between 1965-1985, (c) between1985-2005, and (d) after 2005. The basic principle in this exploratory research was data mining using the morpho-spatio-quantitative technique through detection, identification, and measurement of the dynamics of the land use involved as the basis for composition and configuration analyses of the conversion.