National Coral Reef Monitoring Program: Orthorectified mosaic images of a coral reef near Salt River in St. Croix USVI collected on 2019-09-11 (NCEI Accession 0223077)

This data set contains landscape mosaic images, created as a product for the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program’s (CRCP) National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP). Orthorectified mosaic images of six reef plots were captured of a coral reef near Salt River in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. Each reef plot is made up of a 10m x 10m transect area (100 m2). Landscape mosaics are a composite of many underwater images stitched together. These mosaics have the clarity and pixel size of the individual pictures but collectively produce a “landscape view” of the coral reef community within each transect. A scuba diver holds the mosaic rig, containing two separate cameras, above the transect while swimming in a lawnmower pattern creating a crosshatching design. The diver takes these underwater images about one to two meters above the seabed at a rate of one image per second per camera. This swimming technique allows the mosaic rig to gather 1500-3000 images which are then merged into a single “landscape mosaic image” file via Agisoft Photoscan® software. A total of six TIFF (.tif) files are included in this dataset, one TIFF file corresponds to one reef transect plot area.