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Improving Marine Habitat Mapping in Data Poor Regions using Satellite-based LiDAR and Imagery Fusion

From the study of underwater and coastal hazards, to the modeling of ocean currents and marine habitat mapping, bathymetric data are essential for ocean and coastal management and its scientific study. However, most of our oceans are only mapped at very coarse spatial resolutions (i.e., ~450m), strongly limiting the management that can be made of many coastal systems. While high-resolution seafloor mapping technologies exist (e.g. airborne bathymetric LiDAR or ship-based multibeam echosounders), they remain expensive to deploy, leaving large parts of the world coastal areas poorly known. This project offers to conduct a feasibility study aiming to test how data from the recent ICESat-2 ATLAS satellite sensor could help create bathymetric data useful for coastal and marine habitat mapping. Launched in 2018, ICESat-2 ATLAS deployed a lidar system from space. While ICESat-2 was designed to collect data on the cryosphere, it is the first earth-orbiting laser able to penetrate water at high-resolution, allowing to map waters down to around 40 meters depth. Our project will have two main tasks: (1) testing the contribution of ICESat-2 ATLAS data to improve existing satellite-based bathymetry methods (using passive multispectral sensors), and (2) testing the potential of ICESat-2 ATLAS data for mapping shallow water areas that are poorly known. The first task will focus on Mayotte, Indian Ocean, an area that has existing ground-truthing data but lacks marine habitats of high-resolution, while the second task will look at the ‘Saya de Malha’ banks, a large shallow-water bank southeast of the Seychelles that is of high scientific interest but has no existing reliable bathymetry. If successful, this pilot project could open the door to larger projects that would aim to improve the nearshore bathymetry and habitat maps, providing a method that can be used in many data-poor nearshore environments around the world.

Mike Jasinski

  • Dr. Antoine Collin, Centre de GéoEcologie Littorale de l’Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), Dinard, France
  • Dr. Thierry Schmitt, Service Hydrographique et Océanographique de la Marine (SHOM), Brest, France
  • Dr. Thomas Claverie, UMR-Marbec & Centre universitaire de formation et de recherche de Mayotte, France
  • Dr. Michael Jasinski, Hydrological Sciences Laboratory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Marine habitat mapping; coastal hazards, ocean and coastal management