Submerged Aquatic Vegetation Survey in Southwest Louisiana

The GRI UAS team recently conducted work in southwest Louisiana in support of an ongoing MSU research project focused on evaluating coastal restoration techniques in the northern Gulf of Mexico. This research, funded by the National Academy of Science Gulf Research Program, is investigating the effectiveness of a wetland restoration technique known as marsh terracing. Marsh terraces are linear islands of sediment constructed within open water areas of coastal wetlands. They are designed to preserve and create new marsh in a number of ways including the reduction of wave energy and associated shoreline erosion, as well as the promotion of submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) growth.

The work conducted by the GRI UAS team specifically focused on assessing how effective marsh terraces are at promoting SAV growth. The team collected UAS images of the water surface in locations with constructed marsh terraces as well as nearby reference sites without terraces, to determine if there was a measurable difference in the abundance of SAV between the terraced and unterraced sites. Additionally, researchers also conducted manual raking surveys of SAV presence at these sites to ground truth UAS observations and evaluate the effectiveness of UAS collected imagery for surveying SAV in wetland environments.