Coral reefs provide a variety of ecosystem services
including the provision of shelter from tropical storms, reef
fisheries, a wealth of biodiversity (e.g., for pharmaceutical
development), and building materials (see Done, Ogden,
Wiebe, & Rosen, 1996). However, many processes including
rising sea temperature (Pittock, 1999) and falling aragonite
saturation state (Kleypas et al., 1999) are forecast to
threaten the health of reefs over the coming decades
(Knowlton, 2001). As reefs experience increasing stress
from global processes, scientists and resource managers
must look to larger-scale methods of ecosystem assessment.
Although satellite remote sensing provides large-scale
coverage of reefs (Jupp et al., 1985), most ‘‘high-resolution’’
instruments, such as Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM)
and Enhanced Thematic Mapper-Plus (ETM+) and Satellite
Pour l’Observation de la Terre (SPOT) High-Resolution
Visible (HRV), provide limited descriptive resolution of
the ecosystem