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Assessing large scale plant productivity of coastal marshes is essential to understand the resilience of these systems to climate change. Two machine learning approaches, random forest (RF) and support vector machine (SVM) regression were tested to estimate biomass of a common saltmarshes species, salt couch grass (Sporobolus virginicus). Reflectance and vegetation indices derived from 8 bands of Worldview-2 multispectral data were used for four experiments to develop the biomass model. These four experiments were, Experiment-1: 8 bands of Worldview-2 image, Experiment-2: Possible combination of all bands of Worldview-2 for Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) type vegetation indices, Experiment-3: Combination of bands and vegetation indices, Experiment-4: Selected variables derived from experiment-3 using variable selection methods. The main objectives of this study are (i) to …