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.