“…The images were downloaded and exported into the R software (R Core Team, 2021) for further analysis. The bathymetry was retrieved by using the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm, which yielded the best accuracy after comparing it with other commonly used methods such as Stumpf Method (Stumpf et al., 2003), Random Forest (Breiman et al., 2001), Gradient Boosting Machine (Friedman, 2001), Extreme Gradient Boosting (Kaixiang et al., 2020), and Artificial Neural Network (Grigorieva et al., 2017). We used log‐transformed bands (band2/band3 and band4/band2), principal component analysis (PCA) outputs (PC1, PC2, and PC3), and on‐site collected depth points to create raster layers of continuous water depth based on the SVM (see Mabula et al., 2023 for details).…”