National Coral Reef Monitoring Program: Orthorectified mosaic images of a coral reef in Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary collected on 2019-06-03 and 2019-06-04 (NCEI Accession 0223261)

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 five reef plots were captured of a coral reef in Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary. Due to deteriorating weather, this research cruise was cut short and transect 4 was not able to be photographed. 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 five TIFF (.tif) files are included in this dataset, one TIFF file corresponds to one reef transect plot area.