Mapping Spatiotemporal Changes in Eilat Coral Reef Over the Last Seven Decades Using Historical and Current-day Aerial Images

Located at the vicinity of Eilat, a fast growing touristic city at the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba, the Eilat coral reef is subject to increasing anthropogenic pressure. Our understanding of the reef’s susceptibility to this pressure is limited by lack of long-term synoptic information on changes in the state of the reef, and their association with the city’s development. Here we report on preliminary results from a work aimed at closing this knowledge gap by quantifying changes in the coral reef’s coverage, ever since the establishment of Eilat City at the beginning of the 1950s, through analysis of historical and current-days aerial images obtained by the Survey of Israel. Our results show that over the last seven decades the reef’s surface area has strongly decreases in different parts of the bay. The observed changes in the reef’s coverage are linked to changes in shoreline morphology, construction of marine infrastructures and increase in human activity associated with the development of the adjacent city of Eilat.