315 F.G. Renaud and C. Kuenzer (eds.), The Mekong Delta System: Interdisciplinary Analyses of a River Delta, Springer Environmental Science and Engineering, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-3962-8_12, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012 Abstract In the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, losses of mangroves have been especially severe over the last decades mainly due to clearing for shrimp farming leading to a land use conflict between mangrove silviculture and shrimp aquaculture. Following the law on rules for land use and natural resource utilisation for reforestation of mangrove forests (1999), shrimp farming-forestry enterprises (SFFEs) have therefore been established where shrimp are cultured together with mangroves in integrated farming systems whereby 60% of the farm area must be protected mangrove. Monitoring tools are therefore required to map the extent of mangroves and aqua- culture and to delineate the percentage of mangroves in mixed mangrove-aquaculture farms. Current methodologies in forest mapping and mangrove area estimation require a large amount of manual work. In addition, currently applied methodologies in base data acquisition and transformation into statistics or maps are varying. This is leading to different estimates of mangrove area of the same region in different statistical surveys. Similar problems arise for actual mangrove distribution maps which are generated based on different sources and methodologies. Precise and reli- able mangrove maps are of increasing importance, since changes in these ecosystems S. Gebhardt (*) Department of Remote Sensing, University of Würzburg, Muenchner Str. 20, Oberpfaffenhofen 82234 Wessling, Germany e-mail: steffen.gebhardt@cimonline.de L.D. Nguyen GIS and Remote Sensing Research Center (GIRS), Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology (VAST), 1 Mac Dinh Chi, Dist. 1, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam e-mail: ldnguyen@vast-hcm.ac.vn C. Kuenzer German Aerospace Center (DLR), Earth Observation Center (EOC), German Remote Sensing Data Center, Oberpfaffenhofen, 82234 Wessling, Germany e-mail: claudia.kuenzer@dlr.de Chapter 12 Mangrove Ecosystems in the Mekong Delta – Overcoming Uncertainties in Inventory Mapping Using Satellite Remote Sensing Data Steffen Gebhardt, Lam Dao Nguyen, and Claudia Kuenzer