We are planning to inventory the black and red corals growing on the Mediterranean sea bottom. I read about various methods amongst them the use of ROV with Sea bottom imaging sensors and cameras.
How to efficiently inventory Precious corals (Black, Gold & red)?
What are the most efficient gears to use for sea bottom surveying such species?
The method proposed by you is ROV with Sea bottom imaging sensors and cameras which is the latest. Unless you have samples of the corals it is very difficult for the exact identification. Photographs alone is not sufficient for identification of corals.
Dear Krishnamoorthy,
The ROV method is not proposed by me, but rather is the one I have found in the literature that seems to be the fastest. Indeed remotely sensed data always needs to be calibrated by use of manual survey. The problem is that below certain depth it is no longer possible to send scuba divers to verify. An ROV sampling survey is long and costly. So my question is whether there are other methodologies that would provide accurate enough results?
You might best start by mapping any existing datasets, such as bycatches in trawl fisheries. Those are unlikely to give you the answers needed but they may guide future, expensive surveys -- while the cost of the analysis will be much, much lower than the expense of deploying a ship.
The surveys themselves will have to use visual methods (rather than acoustics or something else), which limits you to narrow swaths -- a few metres either side of the camera. You will therefore need long transects and those will be more cheaply and more efficiently achieved with a towed system, or an AUV (autonomous vehicle), than with an ROV. (Though an ROV with manipulator arms, or perhaps a manned submersible, may be required for groundtruthing identifications extracted from the visual data.)
Which towed system or which AUV to use will depend on what is available (or what you can afford to have developed). The options available are broadening quickly but purchase costs can be very high, so you may be limited to units already held by research institutes around the Mediterranean or elsewhere in the EU.
Besides conventional cameras, you should consider the possibilities of laser-linescan systems. I have never those used for biological surveys but they look promising for some purposes.
Hi Pascal,
I do not spend much time on ResearchGate and I have not found how to send a message to an individual. However, my e-mail address should not be hard to find through Google.
It's an old topic, but, Are you sure to give available data (Geographic coordinates) for this undangered species?
Regards
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