High resolution habitat map of West Matagorda Bay, Texas, derived from WorldView-2 satellite imagery and lidar data, 2012-2019

This study mapped land cover (water, bare ground, forest, grass, marsh, algal flat, building, bridge culvert, and agriculture) around Matagorda Bay, Texas. The study area was defined by a 2-km buffer around the West Matagorda Bay shoreline and extended from the western portion of the Colorado River Delta through the eastern portion of Matagorda Island, Texas. This study incorporated WorldView-2 (WV-2; acquired on 2012-11-17, 2013-05-05, and 2013-12-16) and lidar (acquired 2018-01-04 - 2018-02-23 and 2019-01-24 – 2019-01-29) to obtain a 2-m resolution habitat map for the entire study area. A novel stacked classification approach was developed to take advantage of high-resolution satellite imagery and airborne lidar point clouds. Ultimately, a rule-based classifier was stacked on a group of machine learning classifiers for multispectral images and a filter classifier for lidar point clouds. The data were created for the Texas Office of the Comptroller project titled “Matagorda Bay Ecosystem Assessment.” Maps of vegetation, sand, and water coverage for discrete dates from 1850 to 2020 are available in related dataset HI.x833.000:0020 (https://doi.org/10.7266/zs2f74bj).