NOAA Research Advanced With Underwater Cameras
At NOAA's Coastal Services Center in South Carolina scientists make decisions about habitat conservation and resource management in a complex ocean environment. Many tools are used to assist in their research and one of the most helpful is the towed underwater camera. Mark Finkbeiner, the center's senior marine ecologist, is using two of JW Fishers' TOV-1 towed underwater video systems to help with his research.
His team is studying seagrass communities which are among the richest and most productive coastal systems in the world. This marine vegetation protects and improves water quality, provides shoreline stabilization, and is an important habitat for an array of fish, birds, and other wildlife. It is critical that this important living resource be protected, and restored in areas where is has been damaged.
Mark Finkbeiner thinks the towed cameras have been instrumental in mapping operations all over the country and his division has used it in a variety of different habitats from the turbid water of estuaries to deep water reefs. In New York's South Shore Estuary Reserve, NOAA scientists worked in partnership with the NYS Division of Coastal Resources to survey over 81 square kilometres of seagrass beds. The data set will serve as a baseline inventory of submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV). In coastal states from Delaware to South Carolina, Department of Fish and Game officials are working with NOAA scientists to survey oyster reefs, a marine fishery that is of vital economic importance.
The underwater cameras allow researchers to determine the health of the reef and take appropriate action. Management includes planting of material to provide substrate, known as cultch, for recruitment of juvenile oysters. Similar studies are being conducted along the Texas coast from San Antonio to the Mexican border where scientists are acquiring imagery of seagrass beds, oyster reefs, mangroves thickets, and intertidal salt marsh. In central Colorado the TOV is helping with hyperstructural remote sensing to identify and monitor acid rock drainage. This occurs when acid dissolves and leaches out minerals in the rock, which degrades the quality of drainage water.
