35 reef units Monitoring design - Ideal sampling - Reference for site selection - Representativity of sites

Comparison between exiting regional databases (UNEP-WCMC) and Millennium Products USF Millenium UNEP-WCMC N.B: similar improvements could be done for almost all tropical coastal ecosystems.

Comparison of reef areas: actual (Landsat derived) vs old db (UNEP-WCMC) (for 100 sites, in km 2 ): Previous overestimation by roughly a factor 2

Conclusions for reef mapping: –commercial sensors (Quickbird, IKONOS) proved to be adequate at habitat levels if coupled with substantial field work and supervised approaches (no automatic algorithms). A lot can be done with existing sensors, and mapping products slowly change the way reef science is done (e.g. better sampling protocols) –But for several configurations of habitats (e.g. gorgonians plains and seagrass areas of Atlantic-Caribbean cross-shelves, e.g. Florida, Bahamas, Cuba, etc…) and for mapping specific communities or organisms (coral) a sensor providing a spatial resolution of 5 m with hyperspectral capacities is necessary. –Multispectral (and future hyperspectral?) commercial data are useful, if NASA performs routinely Quality Controls (cf. IKONOS initial mis-calibration identified by NASA-Stennis team) –Solve the problem of Landsat data access for good with USGS. Completely counter-productive, costly, and frustrating in its present state. –Encourage large and consistent high resolution habitat mapping programs (coral but also seagrass, mangroves, estuaries, other ecosystems…) performed by a core group and encourage production/distribution of high quality geographic products (warrant homogeneity of the products), instead of isolated costly projects with poor coordination (e.g. on-going assessment of tsunami impacts on Asian shorelines appear uncoordinated and opportunistic, without vision)

Status for high-resolution change detection –Initialization of global time-series through Landsat systematic acquisitions (…but continuation in LDCM??). –Selected NASA Data Buy commercial time-series (…but NDB is terminated) Conclusions –These actions provided useful case studies for methodological assessment, but the current situation is a lack of visibility on Long Term plan and data buy for time-series collection (at least yearly basis). –Global systematic acquisition of time-series at higher frequencies (monthly) is not necessarily required, but recommended for representative and research sites. –Recommend enhanced capacities for immediate acquisitions in case of events and quick mechanism for small proposal submission to identify a team and process the data

Status for climatology of land, ocean and atmosphere around reefs and the induced forcing of local water masses –Unvaluable EOS time-series (SeaWiFS, MODIS, TOPEX, N-SCAT, etc…) but unfortunately seldom used in a reef (coastal or oceanic) context despite the potential. –Scientists and managers recognize the value of this information, but the systems remain too scary (complexity, jargon, etc…) and unclear (products diversity, e.g. SST products) for most of coral reef scientists. Their funding generally don’t authorize them to devote the necessary resources to become familiar with this. Conclusions: Encourage the creation of an application-oriented structure (jointly with NOAA??) to propose user-friendly systems to consult and download in simple format (geotif, text) high resolution (1 km) climatologies and time-series (daily scale) of EOS products for tropical coastal areas. Simplicity in terms of access, format etc…will be achieved if the users give the specifications (e.g. Millennium products distribution philosophy “ASAP=as simple as possible”, since we are both producers and users) Current bias towards coral bleaching monitoring with SST, but many other subjects of interest exist as well (swell and wind regime, sea levels, etc…).

Status of understanding (modeling) of the biodiversity dynamics (connectivity, hydrodynamic forcing, human uses, etc…) and forecasting –NASA/IDS on-going project “Environmental Assessments of Coral Reef Ecosystems: Interdisciplinary Research Using EOS Platforms and Numerical Models” in progress. –The IDS project provides a unique experiment to inject images, maps, products, climatologies and daily EOS oceanic products into the design of large-scale modelling studies aimed at understanding the forcing of reef processes. –USF and international partners for Belize, Great Barrier Reef and New Caledonia reef systems. Hydrodynamic modeling of reef connectivity, coral bleaching processes and sediment transport respectively. –Almost no developments of new products, but emphasize is on the use of existing data and products for the validation/calibration of the numerical models. Vast field of applications, but limited numbers of US and international teams working on reefs with modeling capabilities. –US reefs of Florida, Gulf of Mexico, Hawaii, Pacific Ocean (Wake, Johnston, Palmyra, Jarvis, Howland and Baker islands)) representative of only a fraction of reef systems and environments. International collaboration required to really assess the (bio)diversity of reefs worldwide and make significant contributions

To finish w/ SeaWIFS data or Modis from USF (Honduras plumes)

Status for Improving conservation practices through science-driven decision processes –Lot of empiricism in management and conservation approaches which include as major applications the design of MPAs networks and ecoregional analysis. –Often a NGO’s marketplace, but NGO’s limited resources, lack of expertise, absence of products evaluation, and strong communication power often implied that poor products are created and used for management, even at high-decision levels. –Specifically, need to improve the use of NASA’s products (e.g. river plumes have been added into new Caribbean ecoregional analysis, but river dispersal were assessed using only one SeaWiFS image for a particular day) –NASA’s indirect impact on the management community is growing with: Public high-resolution images archive (unprocessed Landsat, ISS) Products distribution (Millennium GIS geomorphology products) Data centers (e.g. SERVIR, …) High-resolution mapping projects worldwide based on NASA image data sets –But still a large gap to fill in management for the correct use of low resolution (1-10 km) oceanic products. Still poor understanding of the possibilities and limits of the data and products (cf. tsunami impact discussion on coral-list), Sometimes space technology is oversold, but most of the time it is under-used.

Source: Philip Kramer, TNC-Caribbean

What is biodiversity assessment, and ecological forecasting? What needs to be done for science and conservation goals in coral reefs? What is NASA currently doing for science and conservation of coral reefs ? How NASA could catalyze on-going and new spatially- explicit science and conservation applications ? Using NASA capabilities for biodiversity assessment and ecological forecasting in coral reef environments

Region ( km) Indirect remote sensing Indirect biodiversity assessment SST climatology SST anomalies Wind climatology Wind anomalies Insolation climatology Insolation anomalies … Environmental and positional characterization in space and time Turbidity climatology Turbidity anomalies DCB, latitude

Region ( km) Indirect remote sensing Indirect biodiversity assessment SST climatology SST anomalies Regional biodiversity proxies Wind climatology Wind anomalies Insolation climatology Insolation anomalies … Regional Data on Diversity Validation Management Environmental and positional characterization in space and time Soft computing for MPA design Spatial statistical analysis Training Validation Definition Turbidity climatology Turbidity anomalies DCB, latitude

Region ( km) Community ( m) Reef ( km) Indirect remote sensing Indirect biodiversity assessment Water quality Ocean color, atmosphere color SST climatology SST anomalies Regional biodiversity proxies Wind climatology Wind anomalies Insolation climatology Insolation anomalies … Regional Data on Diversity Validation Management Passive optical bathymetry Active optical bathymetry Active acoustic bathymetry Sensitivity to sensor resolutions and habitat/community complexity Environmental and positional characterization in space and time Specie, community and habitat maps Radiative transfer modeling Soft computing for MPA design Spectral unmixing Spatial statistical analysis Training Validation Definition Stratification of monitoring Parameterization Reef-scale biodiversity proxies: Spatial index of habitat diversity Reef location maps Stratification Turbidity climatology Turbidity anomalies DCB, latitude

Organism ( cm) Region ( km) Community ( m) Reef ( km) Indirect remote sensing Indirect biodiversity assessment Direct remote sensing Indirect biodiversity assessment Spectral signatures of benthic organisms Pigmentation Water quality Ocean color, atmosphere color SST climatology SST anomalies Regional biodiversity proxies Wind climatology Wind anomalies Insolation climatology Insolation anomalies … Regional Data on Diversity Validation Management Passive optical bathymetry Active optical bathymetry Active acoustic bathymetry Ground-truthing Sensitivity to sensor resolutions and habitat/community complexity Environmental and positional characterization in space and time Specie, community and habitat maps Radiative transfer modeling Soft computing for MPA design Validation Spectral unmixing Spatial statistical analysis Training Validation Definition Stratification of monitoring Parameterization Species inventory Reef-scale biodiversity proxies: Spatial index of habitat diversity Reef-scale Data on Diversity Validation Stratification Reef location maps Direct remote sensing Direct biodiversity assessment Stratification Turbidity climatology Turbidity anomalies DCB, latitude

Acknowledgements Julie Robinson (NASA), Damaris Torres-Pulizza, Alan Spraggins, Christine Kranenburg, Chuanmin Hu, Gene C. Feldman, Norman Kuring, Ed Green (WCMC), Marco Noordeloos (WorldFish/Reefbase) Grant numbers