A NASA-funded project has created an archive of
approximately 1,500 images of worldwide coral reefs. The
archive is a tool international researchers will use, as they
track reef health.

The collection of coral reef images is the basis for a new
Internet-based library for the Millennium Coral Reef Project.
It was created in a partnership between NASA and the
University of South Florida (USF), Tampa, Fla. Additional
contributors, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, international agencies and other
universities, shared data, so natural resource managers could
have a comprehensive world data resource on coral reefs and
adjacent land areas.

NASA contributed funding and satellite data to the project to
develop global reef maps as a base for future research. The
project will also serve as a library for coral reef remote
sensing data. A distribution network has been developed to
make the data available to organizations around the world.
Current knowledge of the total area and locations of coral
reefs is not adequate to see changes that occur in them.

“The archive is our first completed product and will
immediately provide data to improve local assessments of reef
resources around the world,” said Julie A. Robinson, project
manager for the Earth Observations Laboratory at NASA’s
Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. “This data archive
provides access to a reliable global satellite dataset for
mapping coral reefs.”

From 1999 to 2003, the Landsat 7 satellite took 1,490 images
of coral reefs to complete the required global coverage. The
Landsat 7 Science Team specifically scheduled observations of
many reef areas for the first time. The U.S. Geological
Survey manages Landsat.

The Institute for Marine Remote Sensing at USF, St.
Petersburg, Fla., assembled the images and data. “There has
been amazing cooperation at all levels to assemble this
data,” said Frank Muller-Karger of USF.

“It will serve as a source of data for projects around the
world,” said Serge Andréfouët, who led data collection and
mapping at USF. He is now with the French Institut de
Recherche pour le Développement in New Caledonia.

USF, in collaboration with JSC, is characterizing, mapping
and estimating the extent of shallow coral reef ecosystems in
the Caribbean-Atlantic, Pacific, Indo-Pacific and Red Sea
using the Landsat images. The archive highlights similarities
and differences between reef structures at a scale never
before considered by traditional field studies.

Other partners include the United Nations Environment
Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre and the
World Fish Center’s ReefBase Project.

“Estimates of the extent, health and even the location of the
world’s coral reefs are completely inadequate to answer the
key question about how the reefs and the fragile ecosystems
they support are adapting to a changing environment. This
newly released dataset will help provide the baseline against
which future observations can be compared,” said Gene Carl
Feldman, SeaWiFS Project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space
Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The SeaWiFS Project at Goddard
developed the archive and online data interface.

The final map products are due for release in early 2005. To
access the raw archive on the Internet, visit:

http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi/landsat.pl

For more information and images about this release, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/coralreef_image.html