Methods for the processing and scoring of AUV digital imagery from South Eastern Tasmania

摘要

This report details work undertaken as part of the Commonwealth Environmental Research Facility (CERF) Marine Biodiversity Hub’s Surrogacy Program at the University of Tasmania. One aim of the CERF Marine Biodiversity Hub is to develop tools and methods to quantitatively describe and predict Australia’s marine biodiversity. Temperate rocky reefs in particular, are as yet poorly understood with respect to their cross-shelf distribution, overall extent, physical complexity, and associated biological diversity. To address this, surveys were undertaken in 2008/9 in collaboration with Geoscience Australia (GA) and the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Facility to map reefs in south-east Tasmania using multi-beam sonar and collect precisely geo-referenced biological data.udSome specific objectives of the surveys were to i) enable biological assemblages associated with rocky reef systems in temperate waters (20 to 95m) to be identified and quantitatively described and ii) test the utility of multi-beam products as surrogates of biodiversity.udThis document outlines the methods used to process and score the biological data contained in the digital images collected by the AUV Sirius from the south-east Tasmanian surveys and the associated data management for the CERF Program. Image processing was undertaken with the digital imaging software Coral Point Count with Excel extensions (Kohler & Gill 2006) with biota being scored to the lowest identifiable taxonomic resolution, as well as identifying other important abiotic factors such as rugosity, substrate type and form/slope. The database that was developed to store data obtained from the scoring of AUV images is also described