Habitat mapping in the Saipan Lagoon

Our goal is to learn about the present status and health of the Saipan Lagoon. We do this by first identifying what habitats (or group of co-occuring plants and animals) exist. Second, we aim to understand where they exist and what their sizes are. This entails mapping of the habitats. Third, we use this information to study the relationships between habitats and environmental variables (such as land-based pollution). This will enable the resource management agencies with the ability to predict changes before projects are permitted and decisions are made.

How do we map the habitats?

There are many ways of mapping out the ecological habitats that exist within the lagoon. We use a combination of several. Initially, we examined the transitions of benthic communities along several transect lines starting at the shoreline and extending to the barrier reef. A photo of this process is shown to the upper left. We then project our data over a satellite image, and draw polygons around each habitat, throughout the lagoon. This can be seen in the second picture on the left. In addition we use remote sensing techniques that are pixel-based. To do this we 'train' our computer software to recognize what a seagrass pixel looks like, and then ask it to classify all seagrass pixels within our satellite image accordingly. We have found that despite this process being easier, it is less accurate. For more information please see our technical papers scientific publications here.