MAPPING OF MARINE SOFT‐SEDIMENT COMMUNITIES: INTEGRATED SAMPLING FOR ECOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION

Increasingly, knowledge of broad‐scale distribution patterns of populations, communities, and habitats of the seafloor is needed for impact assessment, conservation, and studies of ecological patterns and processes. There are substantial problems in directly transferring remote sensing approaches from terrestrial systems to the subtidal marine environment because of differences in sampling technologies and interpretation. At present, seafloor remote assessments tend to produce habitats predominantly based on sediment type and textural characteristics, with benthic communities often showing a high level of variability relative to these habitat types. Yet an integration of information on both the physical features of the seafloor and its ecology would be appropriate in many applications. In this study, data collected from a multi‐resolution nested survey of side‐scan, single‐beam sonar and video are used to investigate a bottom‐up approach for integrating acoustic data with quantitative assessments of subtidal soft‐sediment epibenthic communities. This approach successfully identified aspects of the acoustic data, together with environmental variables, that represented habitats with distinctly different epibenthic communities. The approach can be used, regardless of differences in data resolution, to determine location‐ and device‐specific relationships with the benthos. When such relationships can be successfully determined, marine ecologists have a tool for extrapolating from the more traditional small‐scale sampling to the scales more appropriate for broad‐scale impact assessment, management, and conservation.