Classification of shoreline. Abt Global has used remote sensing throughout the natural resource damage assessment for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

For the injury analysis, Abt staff developed a model of a current shoreline in a highly-dynamic marsh environment based on an unsupervised classification of color near-infrared imagery to differentiate between marsh and open water habitats.

We also used remote sensing to support restoration planning in the Gulf. We classified land cover based on natural and color infrared aerial photographs. We used a combination of lidar elevation data and supervised and unsupervised classification techniques. The classified land cover was then used to develop a project to restore habitat to compensate for the damages caused by the spill.