Cold-water corals occur throughout the North West Atlantic and serve as important habitats for many other species. We know they are vulnerable to multiple stressors including climate change and anthropogenic activities, but the lack of quantitative approaches for monitoring habitat quality over time hinders assessment of their responses to these stressors. New technologies such as structure-from-motion and color laser scanners have the potential to provide high resolution 3D representations of individual coral colonies whose growth could be monitored over time.  Development of automated approaches for the segmentation and classification of such data would expedite large surveys, eventually enabling survey harmonization by simplifying comparisons across sites and studies and facilitating long-term monitoring of cold-water coral health.
 

The aims of WP4.2 are to:

1. Test new remote sensing tools (e.g. structure from motion, RGB laser scanner) for species identification and survey of habitat quality [tasks 4.2.1, 4.2.2];

2. Develop approaches for 3D point cloud segmentation and classification to enable objective monitoring of habitat change over increasingly large survey areas [tasks 4.2.3, 4.2.4].