The Science of Where Seagrasses Grow: ArcGIS and Machine Learning

From suggesting how many steps we should walk in a day, to predicting the future price of our home, machine learning (ML) is becoming an integral part of our lives. ML is a new approach to understanding our universe based on exposing data-driven relationships and predicting outcomes without empirical models. Here at Esri, we are focused on empowering our users to unlock the full potential of their data using The Science of Where. The intersection of GIS and ML is a new frontier for turning spatial data into deep spatial understanding, and there are so many ways to integrate these powerful technologies to answer seemingly unanswerable questions. We recently did an analysis to predict global seagrass occurrence by harnessing the commonly used ML libraries of sci-kit learn and spatial analysis power of ArcGIS.