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MapCoast Steering Team
Mapping Submerged Habitats: A New FrontierBy Peter August and Barry Costa-Pierce The MapCoast Partnership is a cooperative alliance of institutions interested in mapping submerged habitats in shallow (less than 5 meters (m) depth) coastal waters. It is a rich assortment of disciplines, interests, and technologies. The National Cooperative Soil Survey program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has recently made the bold move to extend the nation’s soil survey into shallow, submerged areas of our coasts. The USDA has declared this their “Coastal Zone Soil Survey Initiative.” Subaqueous soils are the underwater counterparts to terrestrial soils. Like terrestrial soils, subaqueous soils are substrates for rooted plants that use photosynthesis to derive energy and are habitats for ecologically important epifauna and infauna (organisms growing on or in the sediments). Submerged aquatic vegetation, such as eelgrass, grows best in certain types of subaqueous soils and provides essential habitat for fish, shellfish, and other marine life. In the process of mapping the nation’s terrestrial soils over the past century, the NRCS has developed methods, protocols, and nomenclature that are rigidly followed. This has produced a national database called the Soil Survey that is one of the most important datasets for land-use planners, natural resource managers, farmers, environmentalists, scientists, and engineers. But mapping submerged soils is a new frontier for the NRCS, and the MapCoast team is on the cutting edge of developing the methods and naming conventions that can be used in delineating underwater soils. Mapping submerged habitats has been the traditional bailiwick of coastal and marine geologists. Some of the instruments they use to map underwater habitats are not used in terrestrial environments, such as side-scan imagery and sediment profile camera systems. In some cases, however, terrestrial soil scientists and coastal geologists use similar methods: Both, for example, extract core samples—sometimes many meters long—and study the different layers of material in the core. Cores contain information that allows scientists to determine what changes have occurred at a given location over hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. One of the important goals of the MapCoast Partnership is to determine which of the tools in the toolboxes of coastal geologists and terrestrial soil scientists are most effective in characterizing and mapping shallow-water habitats. This is not just an academic exercise. The first question the MapCoast team set out to answer was, what do the users of our coast need to know about submerged habitats? A number of datasets were at the top of the user community’s list—bathymetry and imagery of the sea floor, chemical pollutants in the sediments, submerged vegetation, shellfish beds, and benthic communities (organisms living in the sediment). These requests by shellfishermen, marina operators, natural resource managers, and environmental scientists have played an important role in directing the MapCoast workplan. MapCoast is committed to making the data it collects useful to the coastal community and readily available over the Internet. So where is MapCoast now? Current mapping activities are centered in the coastal lagoons on the south shore of Rhode Island, Wickford Harbor, and Greenwich Bay. Our south shore coastal lagoons, locally called salt ponds, offer many unique challenges and opportunities: They are heavily used shallow-water ecosystems, they are biologically rich and contain critically important habitats for fish and shellfish, groundwater pollutants from dense development along the shores create water quality problems, and legacy pollutants from past land uses are sometimes found in pond soils. Seafloor mapping does not end at the 5 m depth mark. Mapping the deeper waters of Narragansett Bay and coastal Rhode Island is where the Rhode Island Sea Grant–funded BayMap project takes over. The BayMap project is a large team of multidisciplinary scientists led by John King, URI oceanography professor, and they work to map all of Rhode Island’s coastal waters. The processes that form subaqueous soils (sediments) in deeper waters having no sunlight are very different from shallow-water ones. Nevertheless, the different geological substrates (e.g., rocks, cobble, sand, silt) that define the bottom of Narragansett Bay and our coastal waters are critical habitats for a wide range of fish, shellfish, and crustaceans. Not only does it “take a village” worth of disciplines to map submerged habitats, it takes a multitude of funding agencies to pay for it. MapCoast/BayMap projects have been generously supported by a variety of agencies. Prominent among them are the NRCS, Rhode Island Sea Grant, the URI Agricultural Experiment Station, NOAA Coastal Services Center, the National Science Foundation, and the Champlin Foundations. Sen. Jack Reed and former Sen. Lincoln Chafee have also been exceptionally helpful in identifying possible sources of funding for the MapCoast and BayMap initiatives. This special section of 41°N summarizes what mapping submerged soils and sediment is all about, the different methods we use, and the exciting products we are developing. If we have whetted your appetite and you want to learn more, come visit us at www.mapcoast.org. —Peter August is Director of the URI Coastal Institute. Barry Costa-Pierce is Director of the Rhode Island Sea Grant College Program. |
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