Content provided by Mendocino Collaborative Co-Chair Tristin McHugh, Kelp Project Director with The Nature Conservancy.
I’m writing with exciting news that TNC and our partners have collaborated with CDFW to make our California North Coast 3 cm kelp canopy data available via BIOs, an online system run by the Department designed to enable the visualization and analysis of biogeographic data. These data were collected annually from 2019 – 2022 using drones to assess emergent kelp canopy area at priority sites established by the Sonoma-Mendocino Bull Kelp Recovery Plan, and the effort represents the largest marine resource drone surveys in California state history to our knowledge. Because moderate resolution remote sensing platforms do not detect emergent kelp canopy below certain density thresholds (e.g., Landsat), these very high-resolution data fill a key data gap by mapping the sparse kelp canopy that characterizes much of the North Coast.
An undertaking of this size would not be possible without a strong field team and TNC was proud to partner with Greater Farallones Association, UCLA, UCSB, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, CSUMB, and Hog Island Oyster Co. to collect the annual imagery along the Mendocino and Sonoma coastlines. Check out these data directly on BIOS to interact with a simplified version or download from BIOS for the full resolution. If you’d like to learn more about data collection, processing, and application, take a look at our team’s publication in Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation. Or feel free to reach out directly to Vienna Saccomanno, TNC’s project lead for this undertaking.
Please do share this with anyone in the MPA Collaborative or your community that could benefit from these data.