Drone into Asparagopsis!

A new publication is out using ASPAZOR data. In this study the potential of low‐cost and high‐resolution drone imagery to map heterogeneous seaweed habitats was assessed on Azorean coasts, where the invasive and commercial species, Asparagopsis armata, is present. A Phantom Pro 3 drone equipped with a visible‐light sensor was used to create photomosaics in three sites on São Miguel island, and ground‐truth data for various seaweed groups were collected with exploratory kayak sampling. Support‐vector machine, random forest, and artificial neural network algorithms were used to construct predictive models of seaweed coverage.