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EARSeL: 2nd Workshop on Remote Sensing of the Coastal Zone Porto, Portugal, 9-11 June 2005 |
SESSION COASTAL HABITAT |
Jacques Populus, Brigitte Guillaumont
Ifremer, BP70, 29280 PLOUZANE, France
jpopulus@ifremer.fr
The MESH Project aims to produce seabed habitat maps for north-west Europe and develop international standards and protocols for seabed mapping studies. The end products will be a meta database of mapping studies, a web-delivered geographic information system (GIS) with habitat maps, a guidance framework for marine habitat mapping including protocols and standards and a report on case histories of habitat mapping. The Mesh partnership covers all five countries in the Interreg (IIIb) north-west Europe area.
To improve standards for future mapping programmes and facilitate data exchange and aggregation, MESH will develop a set of internationally agreed protocols and standards for habitat mapping. These will draw upon best available expertise across Europe and elsewhere to ensure that local, regional and national mapping initiatives are compatible and can be used to build and maintain integrated habitat maps for the seas of North-West Europe.
Standards apply to data and ensure quality assurance of data, common terminology and formats, and compatibility of data between different techniques and technologies. Protocols apply to methods and ensure consistency in survey methodology, consistency in data interpretation, and common methods for extrapolation, interpolation and aggregation of data across spatial scales. Standards and protocols need to be established for each of the main mapping techniques, together with various combinations of techniques.
The protocols will be tested through a range of field-testing scenarios involving trans-national co-operation to ensure they are robust. Over deeper waters, a combination of acoustic techniques will be employed, with stress on the coastal area where surveying becomes more awkward. In the shallower clear water interface zone, remote sensing tools tend to replace acoustics, ill-adapted to shallow waters. In the intertidal zone, airborne and satellite data providing land cover and elevation are proving highly efficient. Protocols recommend the use of GIS over the whole process, from survey preparation to data assessment, processing and map production. A series of research cruises and mapping studies are planned for this testing phase, and will also help fill some of the gaps identified during the data collation phase to extend the area of seabed mapped.
Last Update: 2005-03-16