2024 Volume 80 Issue 17 Article ID: 24-17288
Atmospheric CO2 removal by macroalgal beds has attracted attention, and the macroalgal biomass is an important metric for calculating CO2 removal. Conventional dive surveys are highly accurate but have limited areal coverage. On the other hand, remote sensing methods such as aerial photography have high areal coverage but do not provide detailed information on macroalgal beds. In this study, we conducted a survey of macroalgal beds using a UAV equipped with a green laser scanner to establish a survey method with high accuracy and areal coverage. Noise processing and annotation were applied to the point cloud data, and the results were compared with the measured vegetation height and wet weight. As a result, vegetation height (0.0–3.7 m measured, 0.0–4.0 m analyzed, R2 = 0.97 for the test plot) was estimated with high accuracy. In addition, biomass (wet weight) could be estimated from vegetation height (P < 0.01), indicating the possibility of measuring with high area coverage.
