A low-cost standard drone (DJI™ Phantom 4 Pro) has been employed to map the ecosystems and features in coastal areas in the northern Persian Gulf. The Pix4Dcapture® mobile application was selected as a user friendly and simple app to perform an automated and customized drone flight over the selected study area in Nayband Bay, Bushehr province. The flight altitude was selected to be 100 m with 80% overlap for images, which led to the imaging of an area ~ 22 ha (413 × 525 m) in ~13 min (from takeoff to landing the drone). Agisoft™ Metashape PC software was then used to create the orthophoto mosaic from 213 taken photos. Consequently, the ground sampling distance (GSD) of the created orthophoto mosaic was ~3 cm which means it was possible to visually identify the features on the images with a size of 30 cm and more. The orthophoto mosaic was then converted to a topological GIS-based map (in the format of ESRI™ shapefile) by a 2-step procedure including a supervised image classification method coupled with manual editing with an on-screen visual editing method. The final results demonstrated that the overall accuracy of the classified mosaic raster map was 87.6% where the κ (Kappa coefficient) was 0.84. The results also showed that the applied methodology in this study can be used to differentiate the coastal ecosystems and features such as mangrove forests, vegetations, sandy beaches, and deep and shallow water bodies. As a comparison with alternative methods, the cost of implementing drone-based methodology was lower than field surveying and covers a larger area in less time.

低成本的标准无人机（DJI™Phantom 4 Pro）已被用于绘制波斯湾北部沿海地区的生态系统和特征图。Pix4Dcapture®移动应用程序被选为用户友好且简单的应用程序，可在布什尔省内班德湾的选定研究区域内执行自动和定制的无人机飞行。选择的飞行高度为100 m，图像有80％的重叠，这导致在约13分钟（从起飞到降落无人机）中约22公顷（413×525 m）的区域成像。然后使用Agisoft™Metashape PC软件从213张已拍摄的照片创建正射马赛克。因此，创建的正射马赛克的地面采样距离（GSD）为〜3 cm，这意味着可以在视觉上识别尺寸为30 cm及更大的图像上的特征。然后通过两步程序将正射镶嵌图转换为基于GIS的拓扑图（采用ESRI™shapefile格式），包括监督图像分类方法以及手动编辑和屏幕可视编辑方法。最终结果表明，分类镶嵌栅格图的总体准确性为87.6％，其中κ（卡伯系数）为0.84。结果还表明，本研究中的应用方法可用于区分沿海生态系统和特征，例如红树林，植被，沙滩以及深浅水体。与其他方法相比，实施基于无人机的方法的成本要低于实地调查，并且可以在更短的时间内覆盖更大的区域。