Dedicated dredge plume monitoring with EO (PLUMES)

Dredging operations are essential to protect coastlines, safe navigation and ensuring access to harbours. With threats of sea level rise, flooding and more extreme storms, the need for dredging operations will only increase and their sustainable implementation will be key. Clients are ever more aware of the need for a sustainable dredging operation and also ask the contractors to work in a sustainable way. Based on previous experience from monitoring dredging sites with satellite and drone data, it is noted that the optical behaviour of dredge plumes is more different than expected compare to naturally induced turbidity. The currently available algorithms often fail to detect these plumes and to quantify turbidity levels accordingly.

The PLUMES project will develop dedicated prototype algorithms to monitor these dredge plumes in coastal waters using EO data and will deepen our understanding about its optical properties. The purpose is to better define the extent of the dredge plume and to make a distinction with naturally occurring turbidity levels on a site. This is often one of the major concerns in dredging projects from an environment point of view. For the moment, clients rely on a network of CTD sensors attached to frames installed on the seabed or on buoys.

This project includes three innovative elements:

(i) AI based dredge plume delineation (segmentation);

(ii) classification of the entire dredge area (scene) in optical water type (OWT) classes;

(iii) EO-based impact assessment of the dredging activity. The new algorithms will use data from Sentinel-2 (S2), but the methodology is applicable to other satellites and even (multispectral) drone data.