Investigating Issues in Map Accuracy When Using an Object-Based Approach to Map Benthic Habitats

In a recent study, benthic habitat maps were created of the Texas Gulf Coast from digital aerial imagery. The images were classified using an object-based image analysis (OBIA) approach and a classification and regression tree (CART) technique. The map was manually edited, changing 26% of the polygons' labels. Accuracy assessments of the unedited map and the edited map revealed the two were not significantly different. The research in this paper evaluates why these maps may have similar accuracies. Our analyses indicate that the small segmentation scale parameter used over-segmented the imagery, reducing the effectiveness of the CART technique and editing.