Development of a field test environment for the validation of coastal remote sensing algorithms: Enrique Reef, Puerto Rico

Remote sensing is increasingly being used as a tool to quantitatively assess the location, distribution and relative health of coral reefs and other shallow aquatic ecosystems. As the use of this technology continues to grow and the analysis products become more sophisticated, there is an increasing need for comprehensive ground truth data as a means to assess the algorithms being developed. The University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez (UPRM), one of the core partners in the NSF sponsored Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS), is addressing this need through the development of a fully-characterized field test environment on Enrique Reef in southwestern Puerto Rico. This reef area contains a mixture of benthic habitats, including areas of seagrass, sand, algae and coral, and a range of water depths, from a shallow reef flat to a steeply sloping forereef. The objective behind the test environment is to collect multiple levels of image, field and laboratory data with which to validate physical models, inversion algorithms, feature extraction tools and classification methods for subsurface aquatic sensing. Data collected from Enrique Reef currently includes airborne, satellite and field-level hyperspectral and multispectral images, in situ spectral signatures, water bio-optical properties and information on habitat composition and benthic cover. We present a summary of the latest results from Enrique Reef, discuss our concept of an open testbed for the remote sensing community and solicit other users to utilize the data and participate in ongoing system development.