Coastal restoration projects can provide invaluable resilience, biodiversity, and habitat benefits. Monitoring the performance of these projects provides an opportunity to assess the success of the project, implement adaptive management measures, and learn valuable lessons for planning future projects. However, traditional field monitoring activities can be time-intensive and may require multiple people to collect data. 

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), or greenness index, methodology has several applications, including agriculture, forestry, and other land-cover based uses. It can also be incorporated into post-construction monitoring plans as a measure of plant health. For a beach nourishment project in Alabama, this methodology was implemented to assess vegetation greenness, density, spatial coverage and plant health through aerial imagery. Drone imagery captured using a multispectral camera was processed and the amount of reflected chlorophyll pigment captured was converted to vegetation index values. These values are a measure of plant health and could be easily compared between restored sites and reference sites, different habitat types, across years to assess project performance, and post-construction to verify survivability of vegetation and increase in vegetative coverage. 

Results showed that the healthy vegetative cover in the newly constructed and planted beach nourishment area is increasing over time and approaching that of the reference sites. Results were ground-truthed and complementary field data was collected. Overall, field time was greatly reduced when compared to standard field data collection methods. NDVI provided an efficient monitoring methodology for plant health, which helped provide an overall assessment of restoration project success.