Marine Acoustics and Habitat Mapping in the Peconic Estuary, NY.

摘要

As coastal populations grow, there is an increasing need for better spatial management of the seafloor. Multibeam backscatter data can be a powerful tool for habitat mapping and segmenting large areas of the seabed, based on similar physical characteristics. In order to increase the effectiveness of backscatter data sets, MBES data from the Peconic Estuary, NY, is reprocessed using newly developed software. These mosaics are less noisy compared to prior results. The relationship between grain size and backscatter is found to have a good correlation in the Peconic Estuary and a simple regression is used to predict mean phi size based on backscatter. ARA results are examined and found to have a weak correlation with grain size compared to backscatter. Overall this study hopes to provide tools to improve the ability to classify areas of the seafloor in the Peconic Estuary.