Quantifying and Mapping Drivers
Quantifying and Mapping Drivers
What is a driver?
Drivers are environmental or anthropogenic factors that directly or indirectly cause change in an ecosystem. HIMARC develops continuous spatial datasets to quantify drivers of coral reef condition in Hawai‘i.
HIMARC synthesizes remote sensing products and spatial data to estimate the spatial and temporal variation in coral reef drivers archipelago-wide across the Main Hawaiian Islands. The driver work is founded in prior efforts to map drivers of coral reef condition by the Ocean Tipping Points working group, summarized in Wedding & Lecky et al. 2018. Current research priorities seek to expand upon prior work by modeling driver change over time (increasing temporal resolution) and increasingly reproducibility to support future research. These datasets provide a continuous and layered estimate of nearshore conditions on a standardized spatial grid (100m), and are combined with discrete reef survey data from the HIMARC database (with the help of our partners) to generate continuous model predictions of reef condition - our Statewide Reef Indicators.
Learn more about some of our drivers:
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To make driver mapping fully transparent and reproducible, HIMARC pairs every dataset with open-source R scripts and software-agnostic workflows. We are in the process of updating the layers now with anticipation of publishing them in 2027, at which point anyone can inspect, audit, and re-run the entire pipeline, making future data updates effortless and ensuring long-term research integrity.