Mapping benthic habitat and fish populations on the West Florida Shelf: integration of marine acoustics and towed video technologies

Le résumé fourni par la source

It has been demonstrated though hydrographic modeling that oil from the Deepwater Horizon blowout likely reached the West Florida Shelf (WFS) not long after the time of the incident in the spring of 2010. Fortunately, the majority of the benthic habitat on the WFS was less impacted than the ecosystems in closer proximity to the wellhead. However, the extensive impact of this event within the Gulf of Mexico underscored the need for more baseline data to better understand the potential impacts of any future oil spills. Robust assessment is difficult when the baseline condition of the resource is largely unknown. A gap analysis of coastal and marine data sets conducted in 2012 identified "benthic habitat" and "living marine resources" as the top two categories for which increased research in the eastern Gulf should be prioritized. Yet, only a small fraction of the seafloor on the WFS has been characterized at the spatial resolution achievable by contemporary instrumentation. The Continental Shelf Characterization, Assessment and Mapping Project (C-SCAMP) is surveying areas on the WFS that are likely to contain essential habitat for reef fish and sea turtles. Multiple complementary technologies are employed in this effort, including multibeam and split-beam echosounders as well as a towed camera system. As of the end of this project's first full field season (2016), ultra-high resolution bathymetry and co-registered acoustic backscatter data has been collected for over 800 square kilometres of seafloor, and more than 80 hours of imagery has been recorded. Preliminary results of the benthic habitat analyses and fish assessments for selected areas will be presented. Many of the areas mapped by C-SCAMP have been found to contain extensive hard bottom communities and support high reef fish abundance and diversity. The overall aims of the project and other areas of research will also be briefly discussed, including benthic faunal analysis and the synthesis of water column data from the split-beam echosounder with visual survey data from the towed camera system.

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