Summary

Description

Benthic habitat polygon coverages are being created for the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary (OCNMS). OCNMS has collected multibeam backscatter, multibeam bathymetry, bottom grab and video data to produce polygon coverages describing seafloor substrate for various areas within the sanctuary. A maximum likelihood classification rule was used to segment the acoustic imagery using local fourier histogram texture features calculated from multibeam xyz data along with multibeam backscatter intensity values. Video and sediment grab information was used to validate the classification. The habitat polygons have attributes for megahabitat, bottom induration, mesohabitat, macrohabitat, slope, complexity, and biology (where direct observations were available), polygon area and perimeter.