Satellite observations of marsh dieback events and potential environmental influences along coastal SC, 2000-2017

NASA EPSCoR at SC

PI: Cuizhen (Susan) Wang; Co-I: Jean T. Ellis

02/01/2018-01/31/2019

Summary: South Carolina has over 340,000 acres of salt marshes that support 96% of the state’s commercial seafood and shellfish catch. Periotic marsh dieback events have been spotted in the U.S. Southeast but observations in SC have been limited. Satellite images provide a long-term, continuous way to identify the thinning and dead marsh patches. This research aims to identify the marsh dieback events and recovery pathways in SC since 2000 via a series of observations from NASA satellites such as Landsat, MODIS, TRMM-GPM and Aquarius-SMAP.