Sentinel-2 images deliver possibilities for accurate and consistent multi-temporal benthic habitat maps in optically shallow water

The availability of frequently updated maps has always been the ultimate goal of remote sensing in benthic habitat data acquisition. Although the techniques offer cost and time effectiveness, the lack of consistency of inputted images can cause issues in successfully performing accurate multi-temporal mapping with minimum effort. This research aimed to assess the consistency of Sentinel-2 images for benthic habitat mapping in the waters of Labuan Bajo, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. We employed two approaches: 1) assessing the consistency of Sentinel-2 image used to map four classes of benthic habitat from 2017 to 2019 and 2) an in-depth analysis of three images in May 2019 to assess the consistency of four-class benthic habitat mapping (coral reef, seagrass, macroalgae and bare substratum). This research incorporated atmospheric, sunglint and water column corrections and four classification algorithms: Isodata, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, and Maximum Likelihood. The consistency of Sentinel-2 images was assessed using overall accuracy (OA), agreement percentage (AP) and total classification performance (TCP). Our results indicate that Sentinel-2 images are reliable enough for accurate benthic habitat mapping with OA >80 and consistent with agreement >80 in both approaches given the right image conditions, which are minimum cloud cover, haze, and sunglint. These factors strongly contribute to the consistency of the resulting benthic habitat classification from the Sentinel-2 images. Also, to maximize the rich image availability in the Sentinel-2 archive database, we suggest selecting images with minimal atmospheric and sunglint disturbances instead of performing image corrections that may introduce noise, leading to lower accuracy and consistency. Finally, we encourage the use of Sentinel-2 images in benthic habitat monitoring since the long-term plan of the Sentinel-2 mission guarantees the availability of these datasets.