Current distribution of Zostera seagrass meadows along the SW coast of the Black Sea, Bulgaria ...

• Main Authors: Berov, Dimitar, Vasilev, Vasil, Hiebaum, Georgi, Biserkov, Valko, Deyanova, Diana, Klayn, Stefania, Dimov, Kuzman, Vrabcheva, Yana, Karamfilov, Ventzi
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: SEANOE 2022
• Subjects: seagrass; habitat MB548; Zostera marina; Zostera noltei; Zannichellia palustris; Black Sea; Burgas Bay; Sozopol Bay
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17882/79590; https://www.seanoe.org/data/00684/79590/

The current distribution of Zostera spp. seagrass meadows along the Bulgarian Black Sea coast was studied using a combination of historical and recent observations of the habitat along the studied coastline, confirmed by georeferenced drop camera observations, scuba diving sampling and georeferenced scuba diving photo and video transects. Once the presence of seagrass beds in a certain location was confirmed, the most recent and clearly visible satellite images available in the Google Earth Pro libraries were used for creating polygons of the actual outline and distribution of the studied Zostera meadows. In certain locations ( e.g. Sozopol Bay), these methods were combined with high resolution side scan mosaics, where the borders of the seagrass meadows were outlined based on the clearly visible differences in texture of vegetated and non-vegetated sediments. The actual ground truthing and mapping methods are marked in the attributive table of the database under the column ‘map_method’. The date of the ...