“Why do we need your help? The images you’re looking at come from Landsat images taken every 16 days from 1984 to the present. When one of our project scientists first began working with these images, he had hoped he could just throw the hundreds of thousands of images into some image classification software, and have the software tell him where kelp was located. There’s just one problem: Kelp is tricky. Landsat was not designed to be able to see kelp. Kelp’s reflectance signature is just at the edge of its detection abilities.”