usSEABED: Database Efforts in Marine Surficial Sediments of the US EEZ

The USGS, in partnership with the University of Sydney, Australia and National Marine Fisheries Service, Seattle is constructing a unique marine surficial sediment database, usSEABED, for the United States EEZ. usSEABED maximizes the knowledge of the seafloor by combining sedimentological and biological information, verbal sample and photographic descriptions (through fuzzy set theory), chemical, and acoustic data, along with other seabed geologic characteristics, into a single standardized format. In this way, usSEABED is more than a compilation of known quantitative surficial sediment data but rather provides an integrated view of the seabed. Decades of marine sediment research by federal, state, local, academic, and private institutions has provided temporal and spatial snapshots of the ocean floor, either as focused, tightly gridded sampling efforts, or in the earliest days, more widely scattered efforts. As is, these datasets had disparate purposes with dissimilar sampling parameters, statistics, and data types. usSEABED filters these datasets, providing uniform parameters for quantitative sediment textural data, parsed verbal data (using fuzzy set theory), modeled data, and both geologic and biologic compositional parameters. Access to our efforts is through our website, available in the fall of 2001, which includes an explanation of the processing involved, sample maps, an interactive GIS site, and a data-download site. usSEABED is held in a comma-delimited, field-defined, tree-d structure that can be brought into most COTS relational databases or GIS. Focussed originally on the U.S. Pacific margin, recent work is widening the coverage to areas in Hawaii, Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, the Great Lakes, and the U.S. Atlantic margin. usSEABED is an ongoing project, with expanding data inclusions and new data-filtering modules available, such as sediment true-color displays and marine mineral locations. We invite the additions of new sedimentological, biological, or other appropriate benthic data to this database. usSEABED integrates years of marine sediment data collections, increasing the understanding of the seafloor and its relationship to critical issues such as benthic habitats, marine acoustic propagation, sediment transport, the effects of storms and fluvial input, and other relevant research topics. The database also has a great potential in contributing to applied marine issues, such as cable corridors, sand and gravel inventories, and fish habitat classifications.