New Release: BioBase Survey Toolkit – Transect Creator
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BioBase is excited to announce the release of a new “Easy Button” for designing hydroacoustic (sonar) mapping surveys. The initial release of our Survey Toolkit Transect creator includes an automated transect creator based on basic information you provide about your waterbody, transect spacing, and orientation. The toolkit provides a .gpx route file compatible with any brand GPS chartplotter for navigation.
Works on any plan including the most basic membership-only plan
The survey toolkit is an add-on to any BioBase plan for $300/yr. If you don’t use BioBase to process data, no worries, all you need is a $150/yr basic membership to BioBase (maintenance plan) and you can add the Survey Toolkit feature on to that.
Below we show you how the tool works:
Figure 1. Once you purchase the transect plan in My Account, the transect plan button becomes enabledFigure 2. Create a New Transect Plan or review/edit existing ones.Figure 3. Click on the Focus Map magnifying glass icon and copy paste Lat and Long in decimal degrees directly into the tool. Click Validate. BioBase will find any waterbody in our database. If we do not have the waterbody in our database, you can use the Ask the Experts button to request the waterbody.Figure 4. Tell the toolkit what orientation you want the transects. Double click to complete the line segment. Save the line.Figure 5. Click a generic Area of Interest around the boundary of where you want to sample with the transect orientation you indicated in Figure 4. You can create multiple transects with multiple orientations on the same lake. The tool will clip the transects to the invisible lake boundary (careful not to include adjacent lakes if you do not intend to sample them with the same design). Click the Save icon. Create a name for the gpx file and a spacing in meters. Click “Generate Plan”Figure 6. Transects of the specified spacing and orientation are displayed along with statistics about the total cumulative distance. Use the measure tool to add the travel distance between transects for more accurate time-of-travel planning. Use the same workflow for the East Bay.Figure 7. Wash, rinse, repeat with the other lake section. Download the created .gpx files, save to a MicroSD and import into any brand GPS chartplotter.
Create a Transect Plan Using Previous Survey Data
BioBase is often used to monitor aquatic plant growth. In lakes, aquatic plants typically grow in a narrow band where light penetration is sufficient (e.g., the littoral zone). Initial surveys should map the entire lake to fully understand exactly where aquatic vegetation is growing. But subsequent surveys can focus just on the zone where aquatic vegetation grows. You can get creative with the transect tool to create a custom survey zone (Figure 7).
Figure 8. Create transects based on previous survey data. In this instance, just the littoral zone. Create a “donut” Area of Interest with the tool and transects will be generated only within the donutFigure 9. Littoral only 40-m transects based on the AOI in Figure 8.
Import .gpx files into your GPS Chartplotter for Navigation
Figure 10. Screenshot of a Lowrance® Chartplotter. Import gpx files ONE AT A TIME. Each transect will be saved as individual routes with sequential numbers. If you upload multiple .gpx files from the transect planner together, you will get conflicting file names and undesirable results. Import one file, do the survey, delete the route, then import the next file.Figure 11. Example of what a gpx file looks like as a route imported into a Lowrance chartplotter.Figure 12. Example of the same file from Figure 9 but viewed within a Humminbird® Xplore chartplotter. You can use any chartplotter or device that reads and displays .gpx files.
Learn more about how BioBase works and the range of plans and add-ons available that delivers the most comprehensive and easy to use aquatic mapping platform on Earth!
