Marine and coastal protected areas

Benefits

• Remote sensed based methods are relevant to the monitoring of biodiversity surrogates, e.g. ecological (e.g., primary productivity) and oceanographic (e.g., sea surface temperature) parameters;

• Remote sensing data can an provide initial information on which field sampling can be based to complement monitoring.

Limitations

• Ocean remote sensing techniques are primarily limited to upper ocean layers (<27 m);

• Resolution of imagery might fail to capture the complexity of key habitats (e.g., coral reefs);

• Acquisition of high-resolution imagery induces costs.

Applicability for Northland

Yes very likely.

Northland has several marine habitats and reserves. Freely available imagery resolution might limit local applications. Higher resolution imagery could be acquired in this case (e.g., UAV or commercial).

Techniques applying optical data will be limited in coverage and temporal granularity by the persistent cloud cover in the region, particularly during the winter months. Mature cloud-masking techniques are directly available for open access multispectral data (e.g. Landsat and Sentinel-2). When using commercial data, care must be taken to ensure that there is sufficiently cloud free imagery available, as cloud masking is not as mature, and ordering a large volume of imagery to ensure complete cloud free coverage between multiple observations can become cost prohibitive.