Standard Presentation Australian Marine Sciences Association Annual Meeting 2023

Opportunistic benthic habitat mapping for environmental assessments in deeper shelf waters (#225)

Gabrielle H Cummins 1 , Kingsley Griffin 1 , Claude Spencer 1 , Samuel Thompson 1 , Anita Giraldo 2 , Brooke Gibbons 1 , Matthew Navarro 1 , Julian Partridge 1 , Tim Langlois 1
  1. University of Western Australia, Crawley, WESTERN AUSTRALIA, Australia
  2. UCSB, Santa Barbara

Understanding benthic habitat extent and composition is essential to improving our knowledge of marine ecosystems. Benthic habitat data remain largely uncollected from deeper continental shelf waters due to prohibitive costs and the limits of SCUBA and satellite imagery techniques. We used opportunistic video imagery employing two different demersal fish sampling methods to derive benthic habitat maps along the western Australian coast. A total of 1060 benthic images were collected and analysed in the south-west (n = 733), Houtman Abrolhos Islands (n = 125) and Point Cloates Marine Park (n = 202), to spatially predict habitat extent and composition in each location. This research employed cost-effective sources of data to create benthic habitat maps in deeper waters of the continental shelf (30 - 200 m), and presents examples of how data derived from standard and spatially balanced fish survey methods can be used to assess benthic habitat. Outputs of benthic habitat extent and composition are key to understanding deeper continental shelf ecosystem processes and the relationships between these habitats and their associated biodiversity.