A synthetic map of the north-west European Shelf sedimentary environment for applications in marine science

摘要

Seabed sediment mapping is important for a wide range of marine policy,planning and scientific issues, and there has been considerable national andinternational investment around the world in the collation and synthesis ofsediment datasets. However, in Europe at least, much of this effort has beendirected towards seabed classification and mapping of discrete habitats.Scientific users often have to resort to reverse engineering theseclassifications to recover continuous variables, such as mud content andmedian grain size, that are required for many ecological and biophysicalstudies. Here we present a new set of 0.125° by 0.125° resolutionsynthetic maps of continuous properties of the north-west European sedimentaryenvironment, extending from the Bay of Biscay to the northern limits of theNorth Sea and the Faroe Islands. The maps are a blend of gridded survey data,statistically modelled values based on distributions of bed shear stressdue to tidal currents and waves, and bathymetric properties. Recent work hasshown that statistical models can predict sediment composition in Britishwaters and the North Sea with high accuracy, and here we extend this to theentire shelf and to the mapping of other key seabed parameters. The mapsinclude percentage compositions of mud, sand and gravel; porosity andpermeability; median grain size of the whole sediment and of the sand and thegravel fractions; carbon and nitrogen content of sediments; percentage ofseabed area covered by rock; mean and maximum depth-averaged tidal velocityand wave orbital velocity at the seabed; and mean monthly natural disturbancerates. A number of applications for these maps exist, including speciesdistribution modelling and the more accurate representation of sea-floorbiogeochemistry in ecosystem models. The data products are available fromhttps://doi.org/10.15129/1e27b806-1eae-494d-83b5-a5f4792c46fc.