The Catlin Seaview Survey – kilometre‐scale seascape assessment, and monitoring of coral reef ecosystems

ABSTRACT Marine ecosystems provide critically important goods and services to society, and hence their accelerated degradation underpins an urgent need to take rapid, ambitious and informed decisions regarding their conservation and management. The capacity, however, to generate the detailed field data required to inform conservation planning at appropriate scales is limited by time and resource consuming methods for collecting and analysing field data at the large scales required. The ‘Catlin Seaview Survey’, described here, introduces a novel framework for large‐scale monitoring of coral reefs using high‐definition underwater imagery collected using customized underwater vehicles in combination with computer vision and machine learning. This enables quantitative and geo‐referenced outputs of coral reef features such as habitat types, benthic composition, and structural complexity…