Monitoring Seagrass Health Using Neural Networks

Monitoring seagrass health gives vital clues about the estuarine water quality, which is crucial for the existence of many aquatic plants and animals. Photosynthetic efficiency is a measure of plant stress and can be used to monitor seagrass health. However, insitu measurements of photosynthetic efficiency are time consuming and expensive. In this paper, neural network-based models are developed to estimate photosynthetic efficiency of a seagrass species, Zostera capricorni, from spectral reflectance measurements. The proposed neural network-based approach can be extended for other seagrass species by combining an ensemble of neural networks with a classifier. After identifying the type of seagrass species using the classifier, the neural network model that corresponds to the identified species is used to estimate photosynthetic efficiency.