Canadian imaging and sampling technology for studying marine benthic habitat and biological communities

The systematic mapping of marine benthic habitat and biological communities requires specialized oceanographic instrumentation. During the past ten years, as part of research programs investigating the effects of mobile fishing gear and offshore hydrocarbon development, Canadian scientists and engineers have developed a suite of tools for imaging and sampling seabed habitats over different spatial scales. Towcam is a towed vehicle which collects continuous but low-resolution video imagery of the seabed over a large area (i.e. 1-10 km transects). Campod is an instrumented tripod equipped with two video cameras and a 35-mm camera with 250-frame capacity. It is deployed while the ship is on station, or slowly drifting, and collects both general reconnaissance video and high-resolution imagery from a small area of the seabed. A hydraulically operated videograb, which uses the same conductor cable and winch as Campod, collects sediment and organisms from an area of 0.5 m 2 . Video cameras allow the operator to select the exact area of seabed to sample and to ensure that the grab closes properly. These three instruments are briefly described and examples of their application on the continental shelf off eastern Canada provided. These and comparable tools used by other ICES countries, when used in conjunction with acoustic survey tools (multibeam, seismic, sidescan, RoxAnn, QTCview, etc.), make possible the classification and mapping of marine benthic habitat and biological communities over large areas.