Remote Sensing Seagrasses in Cambodia: Comparing Sentinel-2 and Planetscope for detecting and monitoring seagrasses in Cambodia’s Koh Rong and Koh Sdach Archipelagos

Monitoring seagrass by high resolution satellite is commonplace, but such data quality is often unavailable for many conservation groups, leading to a question of whether open-source satellite data is sufficient to meet the rigorous needs of seagrass patch detection. 10m images from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Sentinel-2 and 3m images from Planet Labs’ Planetscope covering the Koh Sdach and Koh Rong Archipelagos in Cambodia were collected, processed, and classified, with outputs being compared for seagrass detection ability and suitability.

Image scenes were merged and processed to produce depth invariant indexes using the Lyzenga algorithm. Random forest classification with ground truth data yielded accuracies of 79.5% for Sentinel and 79.7% for Planetscope using unprocessed rasters, while depth invariant rasters resulted in accuracies of 80.8% and 70.0% respectively. Sentinel-2 and Planetscope are qualitatively compared based on technical specifications and factors such as band wavelength, radiometric quality, and revisit time.