Rapid Monitoring of Extent and Condition of Seagrass Habitats with Aerial Photography 'Mega-Quadrats'

Monitoring seagrass habitats is required by many agencies and jurisdictions including Natural Resource Management (NRM) regions in Australia. Baseline mapping of seagrass habitats is proceeding in Tasmania, Australia and the next stage wilt be to conduct regular monitoring of extent and condition. This paper presents a summary of the results of recent research that addressed outstanding issues in reliable measurement of seagrass condition with optical remote sensing. The results enable the proposal of a new monitoring methodology based on sampling habitats with "mega-quadrats" (around 200 m × 200 m) extracted from "low tech" imagery and present a prototype image visualisation comparison matrix (IVCM).