On July 24, 2025, Dr. Genki Terauchi, senior researcher of the Northwest Pacific Environmental Cooperation Center (NPEC), host organization of CEARAC, gave a training session on Seagrass Mapper at Tottori University of Environmental Studies (TUES), in Tottori, Japan. Seagrass Mapper developed by NPEC is a cloud-based web application, constructed on Google Earth Engine, to enable to map shallow water ecosystem including seagrass beds.
This training came about after Associate Professor Dr. Tatsuyuki Sagawa of TUES and the Tottori fish farming center got interested in introduction and utilization of Seagrass Mapper in their studies. A total of 26 junior and senior students of TUES including graduate students of Dr. Sagawa’s laboratory, which is studying environmental monitoring mainly using remote sensing techniques, participated in the hands-on session. Dr. Sagawa himself and some staff members of the fish farming center also joined the training, which made it a very active learning opportunity for all of the participants and an important initial step for NPEC to consider future collaboration with both organizations as well.
At the beginning of the hands-on training, Dr. Terauchi demonstrated how to operate Seagrass Mapper with handouts: the basic step-by-step procedure to activate Seagrass Mapper, what to be considered when obtaining data and how to analyze obtained data. Then, the students tried to operate Seagrass Mapper themselves to map seagrass beds by using sample data of Nanao Bay. At the Q&A session, the participants asked questions to Dr. Terauchi and Dr. Sagawa and discussed their concerns together. Their questions were raised regarding how to interpret verification results, what to do with low accuracy and time gap between the satellite data and in-situ data, spatial resolution of uploaded data, and so on.
Seagrass Mapper landing page (https://seagrassmapper.org/)
On the next day (July 25), Dr. Terauchi gave a lecture in the “earth observation” class of TUES and introduced NPEC’s activities with ocean and coastal remote sensing techniques. Through his lecture, the students could deepen their understanding on the latest earth observation techniques and application of them to environmental issues.
This year, NPEC will facilitate active utilization of Seagrass Mapper at Dr. Sagawa’s laboratory and the Tottori prefectural fish farming center and share the know-how of seagrass mapping with them.
