Category: aquatic vegetation

Need a Custom Map? We’ll make you one!

BioBase’s primary strength is an automated map creation engine designed to take thousands raw of data signals from your Lowrance and rapidly summarize them into informative maps.  These maps have helped aquatic resource professionals throughout the globe make more informed aquatic management decisions.

But BioBase also creates maps that are rather pleasing to the eye and many have asked how they might be able to create customized digital or print maps for their clients.  We offer two solutions that will help you create professional quality maps. First, we offer basic support of viewing and analyzing BioBase data in QGIS and have produced several do-it-yourself tutorials that are available in your BioBase Support & Resources.  Second, we offer GIS Services to BioBase customers who lack expertise in GIS or the proper software licenses.  Below we present a gallery of images from these projects.  Identities and locations of projects have been changed or omitted to protect the privacy of the customers.

We’ll create a map for you!
Navico offers custom GIS services where interested customers fill out an order form specifying their needs.  Navico GIS staff will transfer the appropriate BioBase data to ArcMap 10.x and any ancillary GIS shapefiles (e.g., sampling waypoints or other points of interest) and produce a custom-sized, high resolution digital map that you can have printed online or at a local print shop.  Email us at info.biobase@navico.com to get print and pricing details.

Multiple BioBase maps can be combined into one map and exported as any image format and custom sized.  Send us your logo and we’ll add it to the map.
Request transparency to the image to show floating leaf vegetation in the aerial imagery.
Send us points of interest to add to the map.  In this case, navigation hazards in front of a land owner’s property
Send us sediment depth point data and if sufficient, we’ll interpolate and create a sediment depth map (left) and pare it with other BioBase maps (in this case aquatic vegetation biovolume).
Would you like to add water body statistics? We’ll add full lake summaries or summaries by depth.  You tell us the contour interval and units.
An example where a customer desired to simulate the pond depth at a significantly higher water elevation than when mapped with BioBase. Customer used survey-grade GPS to generate precise land elevation data while walking along the soon-to-be-inundated shore.  Customer submitted these point elevation data to Navico along with a high-water shoreline for incorporation into the lake map.
If you have any custom mapping or presentation needs with your BioBase data contact us today at info.biobase@navico.com and we’ll provide you with an order form and generate a quote and delivery timeline for your map.

 

Choosing and Installing your Lowrance Transducer

The transducer connected to your Lowrance echosounder plays a critical role in producing quality map outputs.  Fortunately, the mechanics of producing quality hydroacoustic signals has been honed by 57 years of research and development by engineers at Lowrance.  Still, users play an important role in optimizing outputs by selecting the correct transducer and installing it correctly

Continue reading “Choosing and Installing your Lowrance Transducer”

"Back from the Brink" – Around we go

The Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration Foundation provides a critique of the investigation into the fall and rise of fish populations in a Northern Wisconsin lake (Ellwood), and the potential links with an invasive aquatic plant (Eurasian watermilfoil) and a common aquatic herbicide (2,4-D).  See the original news story here.  It’s an ongoing saga that we originally commented on in an earlier post

We believe with more rigorous habitat mapping and monitoring, this story (and future ones) will become less interesting because entertaining anecdotes will be replaced with good objective and quantitative data.

BioBase In The News: Aquatic Habitat Mapping "Off-the-Shelf"

From the Peninsula Clarion in Alaska published on 6/19/2014.  Story by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ecologist Mark Laker with the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.

Continue reading “BioBase In The News: Aquatic Habitat Mapping "Off-the-Shelf"”

Delineating Invasive Plant Beds the Easy Way

Effective management of invasive aquatic plants requires some fundamental but previously difficult prerequisites.  First, you have to find the infestations; not easy when you can’t see underwater.  Second, you have to create boundaries of the infestation; also not easy when you can’t see underwater or when the plant does not behave and form perfect surface-growing patches that you can trace with your GPS.  So it used to be a game of darts using whatever tools available (e.g. rakes, manual interpretation of GPS and sonar, aquascopes, snorkeling, scribbling on paper maps) to crudely estimate the extent of invasive plant growth.  Needless to say, delineations using this technique have been crude leading to equally crude and often ineffective management.

Continue reading “Delineating Invasive Plant Beds the Easy Way”

Guest Blog: Precision aquatic plant assessment and management in Michigan Lakes

By Jennifer L. Jermalowicz-Jones
Restorative LakeSciences is actively involved in the management and restoration of nearly 60 lakes in the state of Michigan and on water bodies in other states such as California and Wisconsin.  As an innovative specialty firm of advanced-degreed limnology experts, our goal is to provide thorough educational training to lake communities while using the most innovative technologies for lake improvements.  BioBase software (Contour Innovations, LLC) in combination with the Lowrance® HDS8 side- and down-scanning capabilities allows us to precisely determine the biovolume of the submersed aquatic vegetation in inland lakes.  Additionally, it also assists in the determination of individual aquatic vegetation bed areas that are mapped by aquatic botanists to be treated precisely with systemic or contact aquatic herbicides or with other removal technologies (Figure 1).  This technology has resulted in highly effective reductions of nuisance aquatic vegetation biovolume and bed densities due to the precision of treatments.  As a result, all of our lake management communities have been satisfied with the strategy and can easily see significant progress within a single season.
Restorative Lake Sciences, Evans Lake, Michigan, ciBioBase, BioBase, Eurasian watermilfoil, mapping, aquatic plants
Figure 1. ciBioBase aquatic vegetation heatmap collected by Grant Jones, Field Operations Manager, Restorative Lake Sciences (left) and Eurasian watermilfoil beds delineated with companion species surveys and the BioBase polygon tool.  Polygons were exported from BioBase and uploaded to Google Earth.
Jennifer L. Jermalowicz-Jones, MS, Ph.D Candidate, is the Water Resources Director at Restorative Lake Sciences and oversees over nearly 60 inland lake projects which include aquatic vegetation mapping and management, lake sediment reduction studies and management, algal quantification and identification and algal management programs, and watershed management programs.  She has over 24 years of experience in lake research and management and is pursuing her doctoral degree from Michigan State University in Water Resource Management.  She is also the President of the Michigan Chapter of the North American Lake Management Society, serves as the Science Advisory Chair on the Michigan Lake and Stream Associations Executive Board of Directors, has won numerous awards and grants for her aquatic ecosystem research, and has presented numerous papers at state and national conferences on water resource and lake management.

Color Enhancing your Sonar Log

ciBioBase’s Trip Replay feature that couples bottom depth, aquatic vegetation biovolume, and bottom hardness maps with your actual Sonar Log empowers you with a verification tool that ensures an accurate map in every system you map, every time.  The sonar log also provides users and our Quality Control team helpful information about signal quality and transducer placement that can help both parties diagnose issues.

A little known feature in ciBioBase allows users to reprocess their Lowrance HDS/Elite sonar log at different color and sensitivity settings (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Trip Reprocessing Tab that allows ciBioBase users to reprocess their trips with new edits.  Try reprocessing your sonar log at a higher color (e.g., 240) for “cooling” the colors in your sonar log in ciBioBase and to bring out subtle bottom features.

Sometimes, your Sonar Log may look a little too “hot” making it difficult to distinguish between plants and bottom (Figure 2).

Lowrance, ciBioBase, Sonar Log
Figure 2.  Sonar Log showing colors that may be “too hot” to distinguish between plants and bottom.

Try reprocessing the sonar log at a colorline of 240 (default is 220).  This will bring in “cooler” colors to the sonar log and may help you better distinguish subtle bottom features and gaps in plant beds (Figure 3).

Figure 3.  Sonar Log reprocessed with a colorline of 240.

Alternatively, Lowrance has a powerful free desktop software program called SonarViewer which allows you to replay your Sonar Log with options to dynamically control sensitivity, colorline, zoom, and range (Figure 4).

Figure 4.  SonarViewer is a free download from Lowrance and has a range of tools for enhancing the contrast of bottom features detected by your Lowrance HDS or Elite.

Use SonarViewer to review your files prior to upload to ciBioBase if you suspect possible signal quality issues or are testing different transducer setups for optimal signal quality.  Signal Quality should also be continually monitored by watching your SONAR page on your HDS or Elite while collecting data on the water.  A helpful rule of thumb is that a signal that is clear and crisp to your eyes is most likely clear and crisp to ciBioBase algorithms.

For more Tips & Tricks visit our Support Resources Page –Here

 

Quantitative Aquatic Vegetation Management

Aquatic plants are often integral components of lake ecosystems and invasive species often disrupt the ecological balance of lakes.  Past aquatic plant assessments were qualitative and imprecise leading to poorly informed management decisions and prescriptions which have carried significant environmental and economic costs.  New acoustic and cloud computing technologies have revolutionized the aquatic industry and now highly precise estimates of aquatic plant abundance, growth patterns, and response to management can be quantitatively assessed.  New BioBase reports take this into consideration in multiple areas:

Aquatic plant management and monitoring
Aquatic plant management and habitat assessments with quantitative metrics

BioBase creates a standard report for each file that is uploaded to the system.  One section of the standard report (Biovolume by Quantity) identifies the relationship between data collected and % of data points that fall within a certain biovolume (% of the water column occupied by plants) range.  For example, in the image above 6.8% of data points collected and processed had plant biovolume above 80%, 5.19% of points had biovolume between 60-80% and 11.99% of data points showed biovoume above 60% (5.19+6.80).  If a management technique was used it would be very easy to identify, with quantitative plant management metrics, that objectives were met.  This may mean that nuisance plants above 60% biovolume were reduced by 90%.  Now we know if this is the case.

Using qualitative or subjective determinations of plant growth with only periodic surveys has led to problems of repeatability by other surveyors, lack of precise understanding of how much growth has changed over time, and an inability to rapidly detect change in lake conditions.  Now we can objectively determine if management techniques are having their desired effect.

Lake managers and plant monitoring groups can now take data to the next level with the three dimensional aspect of plant delineation using water column percent biovolume and BioBase standard reports.

Optimal Percent SAV Biovolume? 50% is a Good Start

At Contour Innovations we’ve long argued the importance of objectively assessing submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV) abundance to better inform management decisions.  Our last blog post discussing a recent controversy over the role of herbicides in indirectly affecting fisheries declines in Wisconsin reinforces why this is so important.  When we talk abundance per se, we need a metric that is quantitative, yet is intuitive.   The percent of the water column taken up by vegetation growth (i.e., percent “biovolume”) represents such a metric and is the primary variable that is mapped in ciBioBase.  Zero means no growth (blue).  100% represents growth all the way to the surface (red; Figure 1).

SAV, Aquatic Vegetation map, Lowrance HDS, Surface growing vegetation
Figure 1. SAV Biovolume map (left), boat tracks (red lines), boat location (red dot), and sonar chart of vegetation growing to the lake surface on Orchard Lake, MN.

Zero is undesirable in lake environments where vegetation growth is natural or where an artificial lake is managed for vegetation-dependent fisheries (e.g., largemouth bass or northern pike).  No vegetation growth can also cause and be an effect of water quality impairments as discussed here).  In contrast, 100% is undesirable from an aquatic recreation standpoint because props get tangled up and it’s difficult to navigate your boat through surface mats of vegetation (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Aquatic Vegetation (100% Biovolume) growing all the way to the water surface on Orchard Lake, MN and impediments to motorized recreation. 

If no plant growth is bad (0%), but plant growth all the way to the surface (100%) is bad, then good MUST be somewhere in between.  Indeed!  From a Fisheries standpoint, 40-60% average biovolume is good because there is habitat for vegetation-dependent species like largemouth bass, bluegill, northern pike, and indicator species like blackchin shiners that are sensitive to vegetation loss (Figure 3).

Figure 3.  Probability of sampling blackchin shiners as a function of increasing SAV % biovolume  in Square Lake, MN (Adapted from Valley et al. 2010 Hydrobiologia 644:385-399)

From a water quality standpoint, 40-60% biovolume is sufficient to anchor sediments and will promoting better water clarity than if nothing was growing.  Finally, 40-60% biovolume means that most growth is below the depth of your outboard prop and thus you generally won’t encounter the situation as seen in Figure 1.

A case study in MN, WI, NC, and FL lakes

CI is currently involved in a collaborative research project where acoustic data with Lowrance HDS was passively collected while conducting point-intercept surveys.  Acoustic data (.sl2 files) were uploaded to ciBioBase and the Biovolume value for each species survey point was extracted from the exported raster grid (“Extract Value From Point” in the Spatial Analyst Toolbox in ArcGIS or see our Point-Intercept on Steroids blog).  Figure 4 displays a wealth of information about the status of plant growth and management in the surveyed lakes.  With on-the-fly data entry for the plant species surveys and uploading of the .sl2 file to ciBioBase, a similar graph could be produced within hours of finishing a survey, and thus facilitating informed and rapid decision making.

Figure 4.  Biovolume at invasive species sample points and native sample points free of invasive species.  Non-vegetated sites are not included in the analysis.  Lakes range from intermediate nutrient levels, Mesotrophic (M), to high nutient levels, eutrophic (E).  Berry, Gibbs, Swan, Wingra, and Round are in WI; Gray’s, Gideon’s, and St. Alban’s Bays are bays of Lake Minnetonka, MN; Waccamaw is NC; Tracy, Kissimmee, Istokpoga are FL lakes.  All MN and WI lakes are infested with Eurasian watermilfoil.  All NC and FL lakes are infested with Hydrilla.  Waccamaw is bog stained and the hydrilla is a recent infestation

Specifically this graph tells us the following:

  1. Invasives grow closer to the surface of lakes than natives and growth seems to be highest in lakes of intermediate productivity (meso-eutrophic)
  2. Natives appear to grow at the 40-60% biovolume level regardless of productivity.
  3. Native growth can be an objective benchmark from which to judge the success of invasive management in non-eradication management regimes.
  4. Aquatic Plant management was successful at bringing down invasive growth to the level of natives in Gray’s Bay of Lake Minnetonka, Kissimmee, and Istokpoga
Something as simple as what is displayed in Figure 4 can bring an objective point of reference to the table when discussing the often controversial nature of aquatic plant management.  With data such as these, discussions by various user and management groups can center on the acceptable level of growth to meet Fisheries, Water Quality, and Invasive Species management goals (which we argue can occur at some intermediate level of plant growth).  Without both species AND abundance data, various factions will continue to take up positions with anecdotal evidence that support their prejudices and the discourse will never get to where it needs to be to tackle these important water resource issues.

Detect Change in Your Lake Before it’s Too Late!

Citizens all over the globe love their lakes and go to great lengths and spend lots of money to protect and manage them.  In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency supports a multitude of State, Local, and citizen efforts to monitor water quality in lakes and has implemented a rigorous National Lakes Assessment.  Despite these efforts, lakes across the nation continue to be impacted from runoff pollution and invasive species proliferation under our noses. How does this happen?

Continue reading “Detect Change in Your Lake Before it’s Too Late!”

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