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Case Study: Identifying benthic habitats at high risk to ship groundings in Puerto Rico
Since 1999, Puerto Rico's Departamento de Recursos Naturales y Ambientales has been documenting vessel grounding incidents around the archipelago. Ship groundings pose a hazard to local communities, wildlife, and sensitive habitats such as coral reef and seagrass areas. The damage can occur during the grounding event or further damage can occur if left abandoned, especially during storms. With support from TNC, areas vulnerable to such groundings were identified to support future planning and response efforts.
Areas with the highest density of vessel groundings were modeled using the historic geographic distribution of vessel groundings provided by DRNA.
A vulnerability index was calculated to identify shallow reef and seagrass areas at risk to grounding events. The analysis included using satellite derived bathymetry from Sentinel 2 at 10 m resolution, and benthic habitat maps developed from Planet Dove satellites at 4 m resolution.
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