Spatial analysis of multibeam acoustic data for the prediction of marine substrates and benthic communities in temperate coastal waters

摘要

The combined use of acoustic bacfcscatter and bathymetric data generated by multibeam echo-sounders provides a powerful tool to investigate substrate characteristics at fine spatial scales across large areas. New methods are now required to assess die links between the identification of physical substrate classes from multibeam data with visually classified classes from AUV data. In this paper, we use statistical algorithms to describe the patterns between the physical covariates derived from both the multibeam data, and substrate type observed in AUV images. We then use these relationships to predict substrate type and describe the biological biotopes across the mapped extent of south eastern Tasmania.