Stay up to date on news and features about aquatic habitat mapping with BioBase
Mapping Remote Wilderness Lakes with BioBase
BioBase has become famous for its capability to easily map almost any type of waterbody with very little know-how and hardly any equipment. One of the applications that strikes at the core of any explorer is literally mapping uncharted waters. There should be no reason now why we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the globe’s underwater environments!
Example: Mapping Remote Lakes in the Boundary Waters Canoeing Area Wilderness in Northern Minnesota
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) in northern Minnesota encompasses over one million acres of federally protected wilderness with 1175 mostly unmapped lakes. It’s a national treasure and over 250,000 people visit annually to canoe, camp, sightsee, and fish.
Camp on Alton Lake in the BWCAW is all set up!BioBase’s Ray Valley relaxes on a Glacier-scoured Granite boulder “lounger” in the BWCA after a hard day of canoeing, mapping (and fishing).
The hardest thing about mapping lakes in the BWCAW is the manually labor of paddling the canoe. The rest is easy…
Start with the Lowrance Kit. This kit with an older generation Lowrance Elite 5Ti is a nice compact ultra-light application.If you’ve got the room, the BioBase portable kit with a nice backback softcase is a great portable mapping option. BioBase is the exclusive seller for these kits (photo courtesy of Amaruq Environmental services)A $20 Suction cup transducer bracket bent downward to accommodate the slant in the canoe hull is all you need.Running the transducer perpendicular to the hull works just fine, especially if you are just using the broadband 200 khz channel. If you are running side-scan or want to do vegetation mapping with downscan, we recommend a different mount that secures the transducer parallel or inline with the hull. Always be cognizant of proper transducer mounting to ensure quality BioBase outputs.It’s important to monitor your screens while mapping with BioBase, but not so much that you miss the beautiful surroundings (or worse run into something in your path because you aren’t watching where you are going!).A never before mapped offshore reef on Alton Lake, MN. BioBase processes uploaded files within minutesNot only do you get depth (bathymetric) maps with BioBase, but also bottom hardness maps and vegetation maps (not shown because there wasn’t any in Alton)Striking difference between hard and soft areas in these lakes as viewed from a screen shot from the Lowrance Elite-5 Ti. These differences in bottom habitats control what kind of fish can live in the lake and also its vulnerability to pollution and climate change.
You have heard us say you can’t protect what you don’t measure, Mapping is Managing, Fit for Purpose mapping. It may sound cliche, but its not. The technology of mapping has come a long way. Its easier and more affordable than it ever was. Let’s kindle the explorer in all of us and chart the uncharted!
BioBase is a cloud platform for the automated mapping of aquatic habitats (lakes, rivers, ponds, coasts). Standard algorithms process sonar datafiles (EcoSound Product). Depth and vegetation maps and data reports are rapidly created and stored in a private cloud account for analysis, and sharing. This blog highlights a range of internal and external research, frequently asked questions, feature descriptions and highlights, tips and tricks, and photo galleries.
View all posts by biobasemaps
