Institute for Marine Remote Sensing
The Institute for Marine Remote Sensing (IMaRS) of the College of Marine Science is located in the Knight Oceanographic Research Center (KORC) building at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, Florida campus. Our research activities focus on the analysis of digital data – satellite sensor data in particular – and on the development of applications of these data at local, regional, and global scales. On this website you can find links to our hosted data, a highlighted publications list, researcher pages. Below are some highlighted projects led by IMaRS.
MBON
MBON is a growing global initiative to improve our understanding of changes and connections between marine biodiversity and ecosystem functions.
CARIACO
CARIACO (Carbon Retention in a Colored Ocean) was a time-series data collection program consisting of 232 monthly core cruises from 1995 through January 2017. This time series consists of field observations using ship, mooring, and satellite platforms in the eastern Cariaco Basin at 10°30’N, 64°40’W.
Millennium Corals
The Landsat7-derived data products from this effort were the first global uniform map of shallow coral reef ecosystems. The full Landsat image archive and the resulting GIS shapefiles are available in the public domain.
NSF 3D Wetlands
The 3D Wetlands Project provides WorldView2&3-derived landcover class and LiDAR-derived DEM data at an unprecedented 2m resolution for the entirety of the SouthEastern US coast. The landcover product offers access to 12,929 processed and classified imagery with temporal coverage from 2009 to 2018.
Our Mission
IMaRS Mission Statement
We specialize in coastal processes of highly variable regions like the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea and Cuba using instruments such as AVHRR, CZCS, SeaWiFS, MODIS, and Landsat. We use other sensors such as altimeters and scatterometers to examine the physical environment in the adjacent deep ocean.
The IMARS team of graduate students and post-doctoral scientists are actively engaged in a variety of research projects which are contributing to new processes and creating new data tools.