Habitat Mapping for Conservation Planning in Baa Atoll, Republic of Maldives by Serge Andréfouët,1 Yossuf Rilwan,2 and Mélanie

In order to propose spatially-explicit conservation strategies driven by biodiversity for Baa Atoll, habitat maps were created from LANDSAT and Quickbird satellite images. The LANDSAT derived habitat map described the atoll geomorphology following the Millennium Coral Reef Mapping Project typology, which is made of 5 different hierarchical levels. The Quickbird derived high spatial resolution habitat map is a map of both geomorphological and benthic hierarchical information. Benthic information comes from 24 field stations surveyed in May-June 2009 for this project, and from an independent survey that quantified forereef coral cover and dominant growth forms for all the reefs found in Baa Atoll in June 2008. The Quickbird derived habitat map is created to take advantage of this extensive data set, which minimizes mapping errors on forereefs. Other reef zones were also mapped by considering the hierarchical level (geomorphology and benthic if possible) that minimized photo-interpretation uncertainty. Both habitat maps were processed to display habitat richness for all virtual management units found along a regular grid (1 km2-cell). The differences due to different spatial and thematic resolution are discussed.