Coastal Services Center

Focus Areas

The focus areas of the Coastal Remote Sensing (CRS) Program are:

• Benthic Habitat Mapping projects focus on characterizing the physical and biological features of estuarine benthic habitats.
• Coastal Water Quality projects investigate the complex nature of the impacts of terrestrial land management practices on coastal water quality and the capability of remote sensing to monitor and measure those impacts.
• The Harmful Algal Bloom (HAB) project develops and supports technology and tools that provide coastal managers with information that will assist them in improving the efficiency of their HAB mitigation programs.
• Land Cover Analysis projects emphasize land use or land cover changes in the coastal regions of the United States. One major activity includes the development of the Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP) product line, a national effort to map the nation's coastal land cover on a five-year revisit cycle. Additional land cover activities include the investigation of new and innovative processing techniques, satellite data sources, and applications.
• Topographic Change Mapping projects are collecting high-resolution elevation data sets in response to coastal managers' need for accurate, timely information in the coastal regions and to support the Digital Coast Initiative. Airborne-derived topographic data include Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) data and Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (IfSAR) data.