Coral Reef Flyover of the Florida Keys

  • Released Monday, October 23, 2000
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One year, 900 locations, thousands of coral reefs. That's the tally of NASA's Landsat 7 satellite as it continues to deliver cutting edge images and information about the Earth.

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.

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.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Scientific Visualization Studio

This page was originally published on Monday, October 23, 2000.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:58 PM EDT.

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