Floating Forests Kelp Cover from Online Citizen Science

This dataset comes from the Floating Forests project (http://floatingforests.org). Floating Forests is an online citizen science project attempting to map the cover of surface-canopy forming kelps, primarily the giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera, using Landsat data. To acquire the data, citizen scientists were given tiles of images taken from the Landsat series of satellites (https://landsat.usgs.gov/) scenes that had been manipulated to make kelp more visible. Landsat has a roughly two week repeat time for the entire globe and a 30m resolution, although given variability in weather quarterly aggregation is recommended. Each image was scene at minimum four times. If no kelp was noted, then it was retired and scored as a zero. If kelp was noted in the first four classifications, then an individual image was shown to fifteen people total. The polygons of kelp beds presented here represent consensus classifications from the platform and are tagged with minimum number of users who classified pixels in the polygons as kelp. For example, at the five user threshold, each area represents pixels where at least five users - not neccesarily the same five users - said there was kelp present. This consensus classification has been shown to match very closely to expert classifications. For more information and links to outputs, see http://blog.floatingforests.org in addition to the main project site. Or go to the main project site, and start a conversation in the "talk" section of the site.