Putting tidal flats on the map: a new high-resolution global timeseries of tidal flat ecosystems

摘要

Tidal flats are among the world’s most widespread coastalecosystems, yet we know remarkably little about theirdistribution and status. This is primarily due to the difficultproblem of mapping an ecosystem frequently inundatedthroughout the tidal cycle, hindering efforts to observetheir full extent with traditional satellite remote sensingmethods. To overcome this problem, we developed anew machine learning analysis of every Landsat imageever acquired over the worlds’ coastal zone, enabling usto map the distribution and change of tidal flats at theglobal scale for the first time.