Mangroves provide many ecosystem services. One of them being protecting coastlines from the impact of large storms and storm surge. By protecting coastline mangroves are susceptible to varying degrees of damage such as defoliation, tree snapping, and branch loss. Using decade long remote sensing data from Landsat 8 we calculated Normalized Difference Vegetation Index ( NDVI) and Normalized Difference Moisture Index (NDMI) to asses patterns and trends within the our decade long time-series for each indices. Using both NDVI and NDMI we found a seasonal trend for mangroves for each indices which increase in the middle of the year and decrease at the end of the year. We were also able to detected impact of Hurricane Irma on mangroves due to change in remotely sensed vegetation indices and asses how mangrove vegetation indices recover over time from storm impacts. Varied distribution of pre storm conditions, storm impacts , and recovery were also assessed.

Contact