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The Oracabessa Marine Trust (OMT) is a non-profit partnership between the GoldenEye Foundation and the Oracabessa Fishers Association. The GoldenEye Foundation works towards improving the quality of life of the people within the Oracabessa community in Jamaica. Its goal is to help them thrive in a healthy environment and fulfill their potential – for the benefit of themselves, their families, and future generations. This is achieved by developing and implementing projects that are aligned to two core programs: People and Planet. The core focus of the Planet Program is marine conservation with initiatives that aim to preserve the biodiversity of Oracabessa Bay as a Marine Protected Area, for the benefit of marine life, local fishermen and the wider Oracabessa community.

In 2023, OMT requested the assistance of a GIS volunteer to train their staff in foundational GIS concepts and the use of various applications in ArcGIS Online (AGO). Diana Muresan, a GISCorps volunteer in Colorado, completed those tasks within six months and submitted a final report.

In early 2024, OMT submitted another request for a volunteer and Rachel George, a GISCorps volunteer from Florida, was selected for the second phase of the project. The second phase included a pre on-site visit, an on-site visit, and a post on-site visit period for a total commitment of approximately three months. The project was recently concluded and Rachel submitted the following report.

By Rachel George
Introduction

The second phase of Oracabessa Marine Trust (OMT) project consisted of several components: habitat delineation, water quality, and updating the warden’s patrol and monitoring applications. Applications from all projects were added to an ArcGIS Hub site (Figure 1). The Hub site includes two pages: a public facing one and one for staff to enter data or view their project information.

Figure 1: ArcGIS Hub home page for Oracabessa Bay.

Habitat Delineation

For the habitat delineation portion of the project, the goal was to delineate the water habitat in the OMT boundary. First, we figured out the habitat variables we wanted to collect which included Mangroves, sandy bottom, sea grass, and coral reef (examples of a couple of habitat variables are shown in Figure 2). Coral reef was further broken down into back reef, reef flat, reef crest, fore reef, and deep fore reef. 

Figure 2: Examples of sea grass and reef habitats in the area.

The delineation process consisted of two parts: ground truthing field work and in office delineation. For the field work portion, we utilized ArcGIS Field Maps and ArcGIS Quick Capture. The field maps, shown in Figure 3, went through a couple iterations. First, we made a field map with randomly generated points performed in ArcGIS Pro. However, the project was not intended for calculating statistic. Rather, it was more intended for coverage to help train the delineator’s eye to different habitat types. As a result, we created a fishnet and used the points to create a new field map. We determined the fish net size visually by coverage. Then created a simple quick capture (Figure 4) so that the collectors could go into the field and quickly select the habitat type. Once the data was collected, it was added to the delineation web map.

Figure 3: Final iteration of the field map for habitat type data collection.
Figure 4: Quick capture for habitat type data collection.

For the in-office delineation portion of the project, we developed a Web Experience, shown in Figure 5. The Experience allowed the delineator to use the edit panel to draw polygons and delineate the habitat using the habitat sample points collected as a guide. OMT had some drone imagery available but geolocating proved to be difficult with control points in the water. I attempted to geolocate an image and had limited success.  However, it still provided some help. We did search multiple sources including Earth Explorer and the Living Atlas for imagery but we did not find anything that met our needs.

Figure 5: Web Experience for habitat delineation.

For the habitat delineation we wanted the area to be broken up into habitat types and we wanted data to be associated with some of those areas. We took a couple different approaches. First, we created two habitat delineation layer types: habitat, and high-resolution habitat. The OMT will make a larger scale habitat delineation with data associated with it. Once the areas are defined and they can get more drone images, they will come back and define areas on a smaller scale. For the habitat layer with associated data, we decided to create a Survey123 with all of the habitat variables of interest. As the OMT team delineated the habitat areas, they provided each polygon with a unique ID. The unique IDs were added as sites to the Survey123 form and we did a join of the Survey123 form and the habitat layers. The Survey123 form was added to the Web Experience to allow OMT staff to continuously update data.

Moving forward, the OMT staff plans on getting drone imagery again and they will place buoys in the water while they are flying the drone. The location of the buoys will help with georeferencing the images. Once they have better imagery, they can start the process of capturing higher resolution habitat boundaries.

Water Quality 

The OMT staff has a few sites where they collect water quality data. We used a similar method as the habitat delineation to allow them to continuously update the water quality data. We created a Survey123 for water quality and joined it in ArcGIS Online to a feature layer of the sites and we hosted it as a feature layer using one-to-many join. The water quality joins were added to a map and we made a Web Experience to allow OMT staff to view and enter in the water quality data as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Water Quality Web Experience.

Patrol and Monitoring 

The patrol and monitoring portion of the project was an extension of some impressive work done by Diane Muresan (the volunteer who worked on the first phase of this project). My portion of the project included travelling to Jamaica and training the wardens on using the tools Diane developed. This included Quick capture, Field Maps and Survey123. The first training session with the OMT staff was productive and the wardens provided feedback on the application usage. Wardens are shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7: Photos of wardens after training session.

I did have to make a new Quick Capture since I was dealing with an error on the Quick Capture system that did not allow me to add a new layer. The new Quick Capture is shown in Figure 8. We had two training sessions: the first was on Field Maps and Quick Capture and the second one was on Survey123 (Diane’s form) and a review on Quick Capture.

Figure 8: Quick Capture updated after receiving feedback from the wardens.

We collected a lot of dummy data during training sessions and I used that data to develop a dashboard. In this dashboard, we were monitoring the shift in sign ins and sign outs, patrol lines, monitoring lines, evidence, observations, buoy inspections, and coral reef activities. I added a category selector and a date selector for easy filtering. We decided to make a duplicate dashboard: one dashboard for OMT staff to monitor the data (Figure 9), and another public facing with less information (Figure 10). Both dashboards are placed on OMT’s Hub site in their respective pages.

Figure 9: Internal patrol and monitoring dashboard.
Figure 10: Patrol and monitoring dashboard for public use.

Conclusion

Moving forward, we would like to continue refining the application on and offline to better serve the OMT staff. The OMT lead is moving forward with sharing the results of the project with other entities to improve collaboration and data collection methodologies and ultimately, enable OMT to make data driven decisions.

Figure 11: Sunset photo from Jamaica.

Project completed.

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