Generating higher resolution regional seafloor maps from crowd-sourced bathymetry

• Main Authors: Emilie Novaczek, Rodolphe Devillers, Evan Edinger
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Subjects: Newfoundland; Canada
• Online Access: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0216792; https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0216792&type=printable

Seafloor mapping can offer important insights for marine management, spatial planning, and research in marine geology, ecology, and oceanography. Here, we present a method for generating regional bathymetry and geomorphometry maps from crowd-sourced depth soundings (Olex AS) for a small fraction of the cost of multibeam data collection over the same area. Empirical Bayesian Kriging was used to generate a continuous bathymetric surface from incomplete and, in some areas, sparse Olex coverage on the Newfoundland and Labrador shelves of eastern Canada. The result is a 75m bathymetric grid that provides over 100x finer spatial resolution than previously available for the majority of the 672,900 km2 study area. The interpolated bathymetry was tested for accuracy against independent depth data provided by Fisheries and Oceans Canada (Spearman correlation = 0.99, p