Monitoring of Seagrass Meadows Using Satellite Images and U-Net Convolutional Neural Network

Seagrass meadows are a very important component of coastal ecosystems, but they are constantly threatened due to anthropic activities. An effective and frequent monitoring of seagrass meadows is therefore widely recognized as an urgent need for their conservation as well as to have an indicator of excessive anthropic pressure on marine ecosystems. This paper explores the use of a deep learning-based image segmentation model for the monitoring of marine seagrass meadows through satellite images. The model can perform a pixel-wise classification of the image, recognizing land, seawater, and seagrass meadows. A dataset of high-resolution satellite images of regions along the Apulian coastline was created and used as training dataset for the deep learning model. The classification performances of the model were then assessed using a set of test images and very promising results were obtained.