Vegetation Coverage in Marsh Grass Photography Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Vegetation monitoring is one of the major cornerstones of environmental protection today, giving scientists a look into changing ecosystems. One important task in vegetation monitoring is to estimate the coverage of vegetation in an area of marsh. This task often calls for extensive human labor carefully examining pixels in photos of marsh sites, a very time-consuming process. In this paper, aiming to automate this process, we propose a novel framework for such automation using deep neural networks. Then, we focus on the utmost component to build convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to identify the presence or absence of vegetation. To this end, we collect a new dataset with the help of Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (GTMNERR) to be used to train and test the effectiveness of our selected CNN models, including LeNet-5 and two variants of AlexNet. Our experiments show that the AlexNet variants achieves higher accuracy scores on the test set than LeNet-5, with 92.41\% for a AlexNet variant ondistinguishing between vegetation and the lack thereof. These promising results suggest us to confidently move forward with not only expanding our dataset, but also developing models to determine multiple species in addition to the presence of live vegetation.

Facilitation between ecosystem engineers, salt marsh grass and mussels, produces pattern formation on salt marsh shorelines

Interspecific facilitation between ecosystem engineers, such as salt marsh grass and mussel aggregations, is a key process that structures communities and enhances biodiversity. Scale-dependent pattern formation via self-organization is ubiquitous in terrestrial, aquatic and marine ecosystems. Despite their prevalence and ecological importance, these two phenomena have rarely been linked. We provide empirical evidence that the facilitative interaction in salt marshes between smooth cordgrass Spartina alterniflora and the ribbed mussel Geukensia demissa produces distinct spatial patterns along marsh shorelines. These findings advance our understanding of linkages between facilitation and pattern formation in nature, and are particularly relevant to conservation and restoration of salt marshes threatened by climate change and sea-level rise.

Spartina, Mon Amour

In this chapter, Huler canoes along a path similar to one Lawson took around the South Carolina coast. Huler discovers the environment and scenery of Lawson’s journey along the salted marsh rife with Spartina alterniflora, or marsh grass. Huler continues paddling across the Charleston Harbor through the tides, and to the mouth of the Santee, which he learns is not easy. Huler begins to appreciate the danger Lawson encountered while canoeing through the waves along the coast from Charleston to coastal communities and islands nearby. On the other hand, Huler learns to paddle and adventure through the wind despite exhaustion. Huler’s first journey ends with his stay at McClellanville.