An attempt was made to map seagrasses in the Florida Keys region.
Methods
Ground Truth Data
Ground truth data was ingested from the works of Luis Lizcano [^1].
Ground truth data used for the Florida Keys region. Two data collections are displayed; one from 2019 and the other from 2021.The 2019 data is shown in lighter colors than the darker 2021 data. Classes are displayed are: seagrass in green, softbottom in red, and hardbottom (corals) in orange. Source code here.
Image Selection
Images from the landsat-harmonized sentinel 2 collection on GEE were used.
Image Pre-processing
Clouds were filtered from the images using the CloudScore+ product published on GEE. The band values are scaled using the sat_fns:s2_fns.scaleBands method, which implements:
var scaledImg = img.select(exports.rrs_bands)
.divide(10000).divide(3.1415926)
;Results
Initial results show some major issues. Next steps might include:
- land masking
- refinement of training points
- implement DII
- implement bandSum-normalization
References
[^1] Seagrass Extent Expansion in the Gulf of Mexico and Northwestern Caribbean (1987–2021) Luis Lizcano-Sandoval, Susan Bell, Sergio Cerdeira-Estrada, Beatriz Martinez-Daranas, Enrique Montes, Brigitta van Tussenbroek, Frank Muller-Karger bioRxiv 2025.11.10.687714; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.10.687714