Coral Reef Flyover of the Florida Keys

With the Landsat 7 data we can rigorously test hypotheses about how entire reef ecosystems form,— says coral reef ecologist Bruce Hatcher of Dalhousie University—We no longer are limited to the observations we can collect by wandering around in small boats and sampling individual reefs to infer large-scale processes from a few samples.

Landsat 7 measurements of live coral in the Carysfort Reef, the largest reef in the Florida Keys, matches detailed surveys taken on the ground, according to a joint study by Frank Muller-Karger, Serge Andrefouet, and Dave Palandro of the University of South Floridas College of Marine Science and Phil Dustan of the College of Charleston. The surface area of live coral in this reef has declined from more than 50 percent to less than 5 percent since 1975.