Coral reef monitoring takes to the skies: drone-mounted hyperspectral cameras help scientists assess health of coral reefs

Why are scientists turning to aerial images to monitor the health of ecosystems found beneath the ocean’s surface? Coral reefs support millions of species ranging from single-celled algae to sharks and sea turtles. However, this diversity, coupled with the scattered and often remote (underwater) locations of reefs, makes it challenging to monitor these ecosystems effectively. To survey reefs, experts must spend time in the water, identifying and counting species. This approach requires substantial time and resources and may also lead to biased results that are difficult to compare over time. Scientists typically survey various reef habitats and species by getting in the water and counting. Photo credit: Greg Asner | divephoto.org Recently, scientists have begun surveying reefs using images captured from satellites. Analyzing images allows researchers to more accurately compare surveys from different time periods and to cover a larger area with each survey. However, the usefulness of these satellite images is limited by their low resolution. Researchers in Australia are now conducting surveys using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and hyperspectral cameras to gather more detailed images and data on the health of coral reefs. What is hyperspectral imaging? Receptors in the human eye detect a narrow range of wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum–the area we call visible light, consisting of three bands of energy that our eyes perceive as red, green and blue. The combination of these bands that an object reflects determines the colors we see. Similarly, a standard camera captures an image recorded in these three bands…

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