Natural Resources Mapping & Monitoring

Natural Resources Mapping & Monitoring is Ocean Imaging's project-based remote sensing service for mapping coastal and wetland habitats and tracking how they change. It covers kelp and eelgrass mapping, wetland mapping, damage assessment after oil spills and hurricanes, intertidal and subtidal substrate mapping, and coastal sediment transport, for agencies that need repeatable habitat records for resource management, restoration monitoring and coastal construction permitting.

For each project Ocean Imaging chooses the aerial, satellite or drone (UAS) sensors best suited to the task and classifies the imagery into GIS thematic maps, combining it with field observations and, in some projects, multibeam sonar or LIDAR. Satellite imagery carries the long-term and wide-area work: for the West Coast Ocean Alliance the company mapped annual kelp presence at Point Loma from 1982 to 2020 using Landsat, RapidEye and Sentinel-2 imagery, and it processes Sentinel-2 data to monitor kelp bed growth and coastal turbidity. NASA-funded research by the company produced what it describes as the first-ever worldwide map of kelp forests derived from satellite imagery. After Hurricane Irma it used a 10 m Sentinel-2 image series to document vegetation damage and recovery in the Florida Keys. It has also developed algorithms to track and quantify suspended sediment loads from aerial and satellite imagery. Wetlands are mapped with 10-20 cm resolution aerial imagery, in many cases down to individual plant species, and Morro Bay eelgrass is mapped from multispectral aerial imagery.

In 2010-2013, in a project funded by California Sea Grant and the Ocean Protection Council, Ocean Imaging mapped substrate and vegetation from the subtidal zone to the top of the intertidal zone along the California coast from San Diego to Point Arena. Named clients include the State of California, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, NASA, the U.S. Navy and the Morro Bay National Estuary Program, where Ocean Imaging has mapped eelgrass since 2003.