BiCOME

The Biodiversity of the Coastal Ocean: Monitoring with Earth observations (BiCOME) project aims developing and demonstrating that Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBV) can be obtained from state-of-the-art remote sensing reflectance close to the shoreline, and that they can be scalable globally.

Implemented by the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in partnership with the Earth Observation Center of the German Aerospace Center, HYGEOS and the Remote Sensing and Benthic Ecology team of the University of Nantes, BiCOME will identify and develop a range of products, derived from remote sensing reflectances, and demonstrate the validity of those relevant for EBV. Another project objective is to evaluate and implement the effects of signal contamination by atmosphere and land contributions on these products. Finally, BiCOME will also investigate the improvements resulting from the use of hyperspectral and very high resolution satellite data.

HYGEOS is responsible of the signal contamination work package. The advances of the CERTO project, i.e. the vegetation adjacency correction, the bathymetry effect mapping and the water reflectance model optimization in the Polymer atmospheric correction scheme, will be integrated in the OC-CCI processing chain to obtain the global near-shore BiCOME remote sensing reflectance product. Furthermore, the improvements of these advances, demonstrated on Sentinel-2/MSI and Sentinel-3/OLCI data, will be investigated on the hyperspectral data from PRISMA and ENMAP missions and on the high resolution optical data of the experimental VenµS mission.

At left, the temporal evolution of the emerged land detected at 1610 nm, by increasing tidal height (Sentinel-2/MSI data from 2018). At right, the preliminary map of estimated depth in the intertidal region (Cuxhaven, Elbe estuary).

Funder: ESA
Duration: 2021 - 2023
Contact at Hygeos: François Steinmetz