At Contour Innovations, we often preach the importance of aquatic plant mapping and monitoring, but of equal importance and capability is ciBioBase bathymetric mapping features. ciBioBase comes with many features that automate the tedious, mundane, yet highly technical GIS processes associated with creating a bathymetric map. Water resource and lake managers and researchers should be spending their time and talents focusing on thorny management problems, not compiling and managing volumes of data and trying to map them in GIS. The science of acoustic bottom detection and GIS mapping has been extensively tested, verified, and proven with standard methods. We automate this.
Because ciBioBase maps only areas you cover up to a 25-m buffer outside of your track, you are assured that maps do not include extrapolated data. 40-m spacing of transects with a criss-cross design assures you that you will get complete coverage and smooth contours (Figure 1).
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| Figure 1. Transect coverage showing a “criss-cross” design to assure a high quality bathymetric map. |
The Trip Replay feature in ciBioBase further allows you to see disruptions in the contours (Figure 2). As in the case with Figure 2, there was a temporary disruption in the transducer signal, thus giving an erroneous depth (Figure 2 and 3). In ciBioBase, these erroneous depths can be edited out; thus creating a smoother, more accurate bathymetric map and associated statistics.
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| Figure 2. Desktop verification of bathymetric outputs with ciBioBase’s Trip Replay feature. |
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| Figure 3. Areas of disrupted signal can be deleted and the trip reprocessed for a more accurate and smooth bathymetric map. |
Other times, these little “donuts” occur because depths temporarily enter a different contour level (e.g., 3ft contours with series depths = 5.99, 6.0, 5.99, 5.98, etc). Although the 6.0 depth is likely legit, it may be more aesthetically pleasing to remove the 6.0 depth to prevent the creation of a 6ft donut hole.
Once you are happy with the output with individual trips, you can merge them in ciBioBase to create a uniform output (Figure 4).
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| Figure 4. Merging function in ciBioBase that allows users to merge individual files or trips into a single, uniform map. |
Tying Bathymetry to a Benchmark Elevation
When mapping bathymetry, it may be important to tie the water level to a benchmark water level elevation. In our Minnesota Lake example, we went to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resource’s Lakefinder website and found important water level information (Figure 5). On 6/5/2012, we surveyed McCarron’s Lake in Ramsey County, MN. On 6/7/2012, the elevation-corrected water level reported by citizen volunteers was 840.84 ft above sea level. The Ordinary High Water Level (OHW) benchmark for McCarron’s is 842.21 ft (Figure 5). Using the Data Offset feature in ciBioBase (Figure 6), we can simply add 1.37 ft (elevation correction) plus 1 ft (transducer correction) to get a bathymetric map that is corrected to the OHW (Figure 7). This eliminates water level as a confounding variable with repeated bathymetric surveys on the same waterbody. The final products are high resolution, blue-scale imagery as seen in Figure 7 (up to 1-ft contours) or the actual point and grid data that can be imported into any third party GIS or statistical software (Figure 8).
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| Figure 5. Water level information for McCarron’s Lake in Ramsey County, Minnesota USA. |
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| Figure 6. Data Offset feature in ciBioBase that allows users to correct their bathymetric data to a benchmark water level and transducer depth. |
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| Figure 7. Bathymetric imagery with resolution (both bottom and pixel) that can be controlled by the user. |
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| Figure 8. Export point data along your traveled path or the kriging interpolated grid for use in third party GIS or statistical software. |
Life is good in the cloud…
Because of the centralized, cloud-based platform of ciBioBase, we see trip uploads into the system from all types of lakes, ponds, and reservoirs throughout the country and even abroad; so our acoustic and geostatistic algorithms have seen it all!
See for yourself in our demo account at ciBioBase.com. In the login page, enter demo@cibiobase.com and “demo” for the password. Operators are standing by to answer any questions you may have!
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