A New Approach to Mapping Marine Benthic Habitats Using Physical Environmental Data  

Authors / CoAuthors

Huang, Z. | Brooke, B.P. | Harris, P.T.

Abstract

Reliable marine benthic habitat maps at regional and national scales are needed to enable the move towards the sustainable management of marine environmental resources. The most effective means of developing broad-scale benthic habitat maps is to use commonly available marine physical data due to the paucity of adequate biological data and the prohibitive cost of directly sampling benthic biota over large areas. A new robust method of mapping marine benthic habitats at this scale was developed based on a stratified approach to habitat classification. This approach explicitly uses knowledge of marine benthic ecology to determine an appropriate number of stratification levels, to choose the most suitable environmental variables for each level, and to select ecologically significant boundary conditions (i.e. threshold values) for each variable. Three stratification levels, with nine environmental variables, were created using a spatial segmentation approach. Each level represents major environmental processes and characteristics of the Australian marine benthic environment. The finest scale of benthic habitat is represented by seafloor physical properties of topography, sediment grain size and seabed shear stress. Water-column nutrient parameters and bottom water temperature depicted the intermediate scale, while the broadest scale was defined by seabed insolation parameters derived from depth data. The classifications of the three stratified levels were implemented using an object-based fuzzy classification technique that recognises that habitats are largely homogenous spatial regions, and transitions between habitats are often gradual. Classification reliability was indicated in confidence maps. Physical habitat diversity was evaluated for the final benthic habitat map that combines the three classifications. The final benthic habitat map identifies the structurally complex continental shelf break as an area of relatively high habitat diversity. Continental Shelf Research

Product Type

nonGeographicDataset

eCat Id

69463

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Keywords

• External PublicationArticle

( Theme )

• mapping

( Theme )

• habitat

( Theme )

• marine

( Theme )

• CERF

Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC)

• Earth Sciences

• Published_Internal

Publication Date

2011-01-01T00:00:00

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Australian Government Security ClassificationSystem    

Classification - unclassified

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence    

Access - restricted

Use - license

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notPlanned

Topic Category

geoscientificInformation

Series Information

31:S4-S16

Lineage

The paper was written based on the research results for the CERF Marine Biodiversity Hub.

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Spatial Resolution

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CERF Marine Biodiversity Hub