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Despite coral reef's rich contributions to people and marine life, scientists estimate that the Caribbean has lost 60 percent of its healthy coral in the past three decades. Conservation and restoration programs have been partly challenged by the lack of detailed maps of the region's coral reefs and benthic habitats. An environmental nonprofit aims to help by using an eCognition- based mapping technique to create the first-ever, high resolution benthic-habitat maps of the Caribbean basin. overview Location CARIBBEAN TRANSFORMING THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS TRANSFORMING THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS The Caribbean Division of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has been focused on monitoring, protecting and restoring the region's marine environments for more than 40 years. As the plight of coral reefs has become more urgent, so too have TNC's efforts to tackle coral conservation––and meet the demands for better maps. "Reef maps are an essential tool for coral resource managers, but historically these maps have had insufficient detail, been outdated or been produced for small areas," said Dr. Steve Schill, TNC's lead scientist and marine conservation specialist in the Caribbean Division. "Not having access to accurate, large-area reef maps has limited our understanding of these ecosystems and the benefits they provide." Having used Trimble's eCognition object-based image analysis (OBIA) software for automatically classifying and mapping small reef areas, Schill believed eCognition could be the enabling, scalable approach to map the hundreds of thousands of reefs across the region. To begin, Schill worked with technical professionals at Earth observation company Planet and researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) to select more than 30,000 4-meter-resolution scenes from the Dove satellite constellation. The team then created a seamless mosaic of the whole Caribbean basin. He also partnered with eCognition specialists Tama Group to develop the OBIA method to automatically classify benthic habitats. CLASSIFYING THE UNDERWATER WORLD To map reefs, Tama Group experts integrated the Dove satellite surface reflectance and Dove-derived bathymetry

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