Mangrove Monitoring
and Restoration
Mangrove forests are critical coastal ecosystems in the U.S. Virgin Islands, providing shoreline protection and habitat, but they face climate and anthropogenic stressors including sea-level rise, drought, hurricanes, and development. New technologies can improve monitoring ecosystem responses to these stressors and improve outcomes of restoration efforts.
Red mangrove outplants at a local restoration site on St. Thomas, planted by local school children and the GRROE USVI Mangroves team at the University of the Virgin Islands.
Advancing Mangrove Monitoring and Restoration
VICAR’s mangrove research is improving how mangrove condition and restoration outcomes are measured and compared over time. The work complements and strengthens long-term territorial monitoring while providing restoration planners with higher-resolution information to support site selection, outplant tracking, and adaptive management. By building on existing monitoring frameworks, the project is helping create more consistent and comparable datasets for evaluating mangrove restoration across the USVI.
Drone-enabled surveys are being used to track forest condition and restoration outplants across sites, allowing repeatable coverage at management-relevant scales and generating datasets that can be compared across seasons and restoration phases. The research is also producing high-resolution 3D models of mangrove canopies and root systems, enabling quantitative measurements of canopy cover and improved assessment of propagule survival. AI-driven image classification adapted from the reef automation approach used in VICARIUS is being applied to identify mangrove features and restoration targets, extending automated ecological analysis beyond the seafloor.
This work builds on existing mangrove research and restoration efforts at UVI, including the Growing, Research, Restoration, and Outreach and Education of USVI Mangroves (GRROE) program, and is generating drone-based spatial products, AI-enabled habitat classifications, and monitoring-ready metrics that can be integrated into VICARIUS workflows.
