About the Project

In response to users' needs for rapid, standardized and quantitative measures to assess reef condition, this project evaluated uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) as a tool for measuring reef changes within five National Estuarine Research Reserves (NERRs) from North Carolina to Florida. The imagery analysis workflows developed in partnership with oyster resource managers provide quantitative measures of reef structural and demographic metrics and, importantly, changes to those metrics in response to natural and anthropogenic factors.

About this Resource

This project generated two datasets at five National Estuarine Research Reserves (NERRs) in the southeastern U.S. to compare field-based oyster monitoring to drone/UAS-based oyster monitoring. The dataset description provides more information about each dataset.

• Dataset 1: Field-based oyster monitoring

  Field oyster monitoring data includes: 1) reef elevations and coordinates; 2) rugosity measurements and x,y,z coordinates of the beginning, mid points, and end of chains; 3) coordinates and elevations of reef perimeters (footprint); 4) volume of oyster material excavated from sampling plots and x,y,z coordinates from the plots; 5) visual estimates of percent cover shell and additional cover types (e.g., bare sediment) in percent cover plots and coordinates of the plots; and 6) density and oyster lengths from each excavated sample plot. These data were collected to compare with estimates of the same parameters from UAS-based oyster monitoring to assess the fidelity of UAS-based estimates.

• Dataset 2: UAS-based oyster monitoring

  UAS oyster survey data includes: 1) project workflows; 2) raw imagery from RGB sensors; 3) digital surface models (made from RGB imagery) and corrected digital surface models; 4) orthomosaics (made from RGB imagery); 5) processing reports; and 6) GIS packages (.ppkx files) from the analyses. These image processing outputs were compared to reef elevations, reef area/footprint, rugosity, shell volume, and oyster demographics collected in the field.

Data access and archival

All data will be made publicly available within one year of the project completion. Data will be archived in the interim with the NERRS Centralized Data Management Office (CDMO).

Imagery and data files will be searchable in the project’s data package and users will be able to download all the data from the project or individual files as desired. The root folder of the data package will include a ‘file structure and naming convention’ readme file to assist users with locating data of interest.

Questions about these datasets can be directed to:

• Peter Kingsley-Smith, South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, [email protected]
• Brandon Puckett, NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, [email protected]
• Justin Ridge, NC Coastal Reserve and NERR, Post-doctoral researcher, NC NERR, [email protected]