True colour aerial photography at 57 centimetre resolution was collected on August 20th and 24th, 2009 by Nortek Resources of Thorburn, Nova Scotia (http://www.nortekresources.com/). Image classification was conducted using eCognition Developer v. 8 Software, which first segments the image into spectrally similar units, which were then classified manually. Additionally, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (Gulf Region, Moncton, NB) conducted a visual field survey in the same field season at 103 sites. From these sites 70% were used to assist in image classification, while the remainder were used to assess accuracy. Three classes were identified:
i. Good Quality Eelgrass: relatively dense, clean, green blades with minimal epiphytes or algal growth.
ii. Medium Quality Eelgrass: predominately green blades that may have some epiphyte or algal growth. These stands can be less or equally dense as Good Quality Eelgrass, but the best grasses are certainly not as abundant.
iii. Eelgrass Absent/Poor Quality: eelgrass is absent, or if it is present it is typically covered with epiphytes or other algae or dying or dead.
Eelgrass was classified correctly 96.7% of the time (30/31 = 0.967).