Shallow Water Seafloor and Habitat Mapping in Cape Cod National Seashore: A Post-Hurricane Sandy Study
Abstract
Hurricane Sandy had a dramatic impact along coastal areas in proximity to landfall in late October 2012, and those impacts have been well-documented in terrestrial coastal settings. However, due to the lack of data on submerged marine habitats, similar subtidal impact studies have been limited. This study, one of four contemporaneous studies commissioned by the US National Park Service, developed maps of submerged shallow water marine habitats in and around Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts.
All four studies used similar methods of data collection, processing and analysis for the production of habitat maps. One of the motivations for the larger study conducted in the four coastal parks was to provide park managers with a baseline inventory of submerged marine habitats, against which to measure change after future storm events and other natural and anthropogenic phenomena. In this study high-resolution data from a phase-measuring sidescan sonar, bottom grab samples, seismic reflection profiling, and sediment coring were all used to develop submerged marine habitat maps using the Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard (CMECS). Vessel-based acoustic surveys (n = 76) were conducted in extreme shallow water across four embayments from 2014-2016. Sidescan sonar imagery covering 83.37 km2 was collected, and within that area, 49.53 km2 of co-located bathymetric data were collected with a mean depth of 4.00 m. Bottom grab samples (n = 476) to sample macroinvertebrates and sediments (along with other water column and habitat data) were collected, and these data were used along with the geophysical and coring data to develop final habitat maps using the CMECS framework.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMOS33D1932B
- Keywords:
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- 1910 Data assimilation;
- integration and fusion;
- INFORMATICSDE: 3045 Seafloor morphology;
- geology;
- and geophysics;
- MARINE GEOLOGY AND GEOPHYSICSDE: 3094 Instruments and techniques;
- MARINE GEOLOGY AND GEOPHYSICSDE: 3099 General or miscellaneous;
- MARINE GEOLOGY AND GEOPHYSICS