I. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background
Indonesia is one of the dense population countries in the world. In the last three decades, the annual population growth rate in the country has declined
from 2,1 in 1971 to 1,5 in 2000. However due to the young structure of the population, the number of people still rose from 119 million to 205 million
during the same period. The population is estimated to reach about 300 million in 2025 BPS, 2010. The increasing number of population has been followed by
the increasing in urbanization. According to United Nation Population Fund Agency UNFPA 2003, the percentage of people living in urban areas has
risen from 17,2 in 1971 to 42,2 in 2000. This was at the expense of the annual decrease of the rural population from 1,8 to 0,3.
The government has put food security to be one of the highest priorities in agricultural development. Securing food and livelihood is apparently linked to
the exploitation of the natural resources base land, water and forest for instance by reclaiming swamps. The pressure of intense human activity has encouraged
the development to move from arable land to marginal spaces such as slopping area, swampy area and coastal region. To develop these marginal areas for
agricultural production requires careful measures that minimize constraints of erosion, land slide, land subsidence, acidity hazards, tidal stream and sea level
rise. In view of swamps for agriculture, so far swamps reclamation has been
carried out as a gradually long term process. Swamps areas by their nature are generally unsuitable for development, which is mainly caused by the soil
condition, water logging and regularpermanently covered with water of their environmental values. Due to these conditions in order to optimize land
productivity as well as to protect the areas from flooding, the development of swamps areas needs careful alternative approaches and techniques in land and
water management. The development of swamps for agriculture has been carried out in various
part of the world for many centuries. More recent large scale swamps
development projects have in tidal swamps in South Asia such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. So far, the projects were carried out as
gradually long term process or step-wise development strategy. This strategy
was based on some considerations, which are: 1 limited availability of construction budget as well as the need to reclaim large areas 2 lack of
knowledge, experience and design criteria in this field 3 social cultural
background of transmigration people who most of them are coming from dry land and are no familiar with the wet tidal land conditions
Since 1960, the Indonesia government has been reclaiming swamps and most of them are tidal swamps. The objectives have been 1 to increase the
national food production, mainly rice; in order to obtain self-sufficiency 2 to provide agricultural land for transmigrates, in order to support the government
transmigration program 3 to support regional development 4 to increase income per capita and 5 to increase the security on coasts along the border line
Suryadi, 1996. The development of swamps has to create a suitable condition for
agriculture and settlement. From the 34 million ha of existing and potential swamps in four major islands in Indonesia Sumatera, Kalimantan, Papua and
Sulawesi, about 5,5 million ha or 14 has been identified as very suitable for agriculture development by government 2,1 million ha, 39 of the 5.5 million
ha has been reclaimed 1,1 million ha by the central government and the rest by local government, local community and migrants.
The major objective of the 1,1 million ha swamps reclamation conducted in the period 1960s-1990s by the government was resettlement of people from
densely region in Java, Bali, Madura islands. Since that time almost no new reclamation were carried out. Regarding the population growth and the need of
increasing the food production, the new development of agricultural land and most importantly optimizing the productivity of the existing land is essential if
Indonesia is be able to meet the food demand of its population. Swamps become more and more important for Indonesia and will be the
future for agricultural development potential outside of Java because mainly in Java, there is a continuous loss of agricultural lands for urbanization, industry and
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roads infrastructure. Rice production on Java will continue to decrease in future as the urban requirements or land and water are in strong competition with the
requirements for rice cultivation and it is estimated that the rate of the loss of agricultural land is about 30,000 to 40,000 hayear.
The development of swamps in Sumatera has started from 1960s by Directorate of Swamps under The Directorate Generale of Water Resources
Development, in the project called “Proyek pembukaan persawahan pasang surut P4S. Swamps cover about 30 out of 8.7 million ha of South Sumatera
province. About 300.000 ha had been reclaimed from 1969-1988 with more than 50.000 households resettled on the sites. The crops yield of rice was satisfactory
in the period of 1981-1990. However, in the next period the settlers found some difficulties with agriculture on the drained swamps included water delivery as
lack of water in the dry season and pests. Furthermore, many development projects suffer from excessive soil problems i.e low soil fertility and high
acidity, hence limited by hydro-topography of adjoining river and basin. The spatial and temporal distribution of swamps area is an important
parameter to be correctly characterized. Numerous applications rely on information about swamps area especially for swamps land from soil
characteristic until micro water management aimed at optimizing best management practices in agricultural management. Remote sensing techniques
can be used to obtain the spatial distribution of swamps land over large area, reducing expensive and time consuming field measurement.
Remote sensing approach is the only way for consistent mapping of overwhelming proportion, if not all of the swamps of the world. This will need
development of methods and datasets for rapid delineation of swamps, to map spatial distribution, and to identify their specific characteristics such as
biophysical, ecological and socio-economic. Referring to the wetland delineation, the US Army Corps of Engineers USACE in the Wetland Delineation Manual
1987 also supports such delineation without field visit: “in a routine wetland determination when the quality and quantity of information obtained are
sufficient for wetland determination, onsite inspections of the study area may not be necessary”. However, at larger spatial scales, applicability of remote sensing
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techniques could vary significantly at different localized areas due to the higher degree of variability in the spectral signatures of the associated ground features.
Thereby, the need to investigate methods that can consistently map wetlands over large area becomes important Kulawardhana et al., 2007.
1.2 Problem Statement
Kategori