Abstract

In September of 2017, Hurricane Irma made landfall within the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve of southwest Florida (USA) as a category 3 storm with winds in excess of 200 km h^-1. We mapped the extent of the hurricane ’s impact on coastal land cover with a seasonal time series of satellite imagery. Very high-resolution (i.e. 5 meter pixel) satellite imagery has proven effective to map wetland ecosystems, but challenges in data acquisition and storage, algorithm training, and image processing have prevented large-scale and time-series mapping of these data. We describe our approach to address these issues to evaluate Rookery Bay ecosystem damage and recovery using 91 WorldView-2 satellite images collected between 2010 and 2018 mapped using automated techniques and validated with a field campaign. Land cover was classified seasonally at 2 meter resolution (i.e., healthy mangrove, degraded mangrove, upland, soil, and water) with an overall accuracy of 82%. Digital change detection methods show that hurricane-related degradation was 17% of mangrove forest (~5 km²). Approximately 35% (1.7 km²) of this loss recovered one year after Hurricane Irma. The approach completed the mapping approximately 200 times faster than existing methods, illustrating the ease with which regional high-resolution mapping may be accomplished efficiently.

About this article

This paper, published in Remote Sensing in 2020, describes the results of a Science Collaborative project that refined and piloted the use of satellite-based habitat mapping at Rookery Bay NERR in southwest Florida.