Session Keynote: Earth Observation for Aquatic Coastal Science & Management: Present and Future
In Australia there is an ongoing significant development in environmental detection, monitoring and modeling approaches for water quality and benthic substrates using remotely sensed data from airborne sensors and from satellites. The application areas cover rivers, lakes, reservoirs, estuaries, shallow ands deep coastal waters and coral reefs. This presentation will present an assessment of the capabilities and limitations of current and next generation remote sensing systems for monitoring aquatic environments with special emphasis on estuarine, coastal water, seagrass and coral reef applications in Australia. The issue of implementation impediments will also be discussed.
Of particular interest in Australia's coastal waters is unraveling the signal from the water column and from the substrate (most standard algorithms for deriving information from remotely sensed data ignore the substrate signal). For environmental reasons understanding this complex signal is important in order to :
1. Assess the concentrations of chlorophyll and other algal pigments, coloured dissolved organic matter and particulate matter, as well as the vertical attenuation of light, transparency and turbidity.
2. Assess penetration of light to the benthic flora as well as to assess the seagrasses, coral reefs, macro-algae and benthic micro-algae.
However, for this information from remote sensing to be useful for adaptive management of these aquatic ecosystems a significant effort is required to tailor the products remote sensing can deliver to suit the management information needs.
This talk will present topics and discussion points in an open format to foster a dialogue between potential end-users of the information (in the broadest sense), providers of earth observation derived information (in the broadest sense) and actual sensor development and launch agencies. An important issue for the future is the guaranteed long term availability of suitable sensors for these aquatic applications.