Professional Spotlight – Dr. Chris Harrod and Chilean Kelp Mapping

Professional Spotlight

The Professional Spotlight series is a deep dive into the global BioBase community where we highlight the unique ways sonar driven mapping is assisting research, conservation and sustainability.

The BioBase team sat down with Dr. Chris Harrod for a look into how he uses BioBase. Chris (from the UK) is a full professor of Fish and Aquatic Ecology at the University of Antofagasta in Antofagasta, Chile. He does a mixture of research, teaching, and administration tasks but our interest with him was the applied research techniques for which he was using BioBase. His research is focused on a macroalgae called kelp (aka seaweed) and its importance as a source of food/energy to fish and invertebrates in the coastal zone. He is also interested in how kelp can function as habitat, food, an anchor of sediment and even slow the turbulent waters of the Pacific Ocean.

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Mapping and avoiding dense weed beds to get an edge while yacht racing

By Herb Garcia

Sailing enthusiast and BioBase Ambassador

Lake Minnetonka is one of the largest and most heavily used recreational lakes in Minnesota and is composed of an interconnected system of bays (Figure 1). Every summer, a rooted invasive aquatic plant, Eurasian watermilfoil creates thick bottom to surface mats in many areas of the lake. While these mats may occur anywhere on the lake, they generally are thickest in certain shallow areas such as the Diamond Reef area in the main lake of Lake Minnetonka (officially described as Lower Lake North). This reef is popular with anglers, power boaters, and sailors. On any given night or weekend, well over a hundred keelboats may take part in regular club racing events or regattas here. World class level sailors, including Olympic champions, America’s Cup, and other accomplished sailors regularly race on the lake and the competition can be intense. When competition is tight, every advantage is important.

Figure 1. Lake Minnetonka; a popular recreational and fishing lake just west of the Twin City metropolitan area of Minnesota. The red box highlights an area popular with boaters, anglers, and sailors. The blue contoured areas represent areas uploaded and processed by anglers using the Genesis mapping service and aggregated into the C-MAP social map. Social maps can also be viewed in the C-MAP App.

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Feature Alert: Add Manual Depth Points to BioBase Maps

Lake, pond, and river mapping with off-the-shelf powerful technology like Lowrance® and BioBase™ has democratized the previously complex and expensive process of creating detailed and accurate bathymetric maps. BioBase continues to deliver new features that empower biologists, researchers, service providers, and surveyors to create better maps for their stakeholders and clients. Today, we announce the launch of a new feature that allows users to add manual depth values to their BioBase map. This is an important feature for those mapping large areas too shallow for sonar to deliver a reliable signal. This is a common occurrence in ponds and small rivers. Below we walk you through how this feature works

Right click in an area of your BioBase map where you’d like to add a manual depth value

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Mapping seagrass with BioBase and saving Florida Manatees

Guest Blog by Robert M. Baker, CPG, PG (a) and Penelope R. Baker (b)

(a) Professional geologist at RMBAKER LLC and Navico BioBase Ambassador

(b) Stanford University student, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Wildlife Photographer

BioBase is a cloud software that directly supports the preservation of our aquatic environments. Words like preservation and conservation directly imply things like careful planning, measuring and monitoring, treatment and rehabilitation – actionable strategies for the good of animals, plants and natural resources where BioBase can play an important role. BioBase offers an opportunity to observe natural systems, like seagrasses, not easily seen otherwise and does so effortlessly and affordably.

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Properly install your Lowrance/Simrad transducer and mapping is easy with BioBase.

Ray Valley

Aquatic Biologist and BioBase Product Expert

BioBase’s EcoSound is a powerful cloud platform for creating high definition lake or coastal maps of depth, aquatic vegetation (or seagrass), and bottom hardness from Lowrance® and Simrad®

sonar systems. For the user, the process of converting volumes of raw sonar and gps signals into an intuitive map is easy and requires very little input upfront. Record your sonar while out on the water to a microSD card, plug the card into your PC back at the office, log into your BioBase account and upload. Algorithms on remote servers do the rest of the work. However, one of the most frequently overlooked parts of this equation is careful attention to the proper installation of the transducer sensor that is pinging the bottom and collecting all the information below the boat. The importance of proper transducer installation cannot be overstated. If the transducer is not properly placed on the boat or not at the appropriate angle, your BioBase outputs could be inaccurate. Modelers have heard it said many times (sometimes in more colorful language), the quality of the output depends on the quality of the input.

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Social mapping of Australian bays and conservation of Fish Aggregating Bryozoans

Guest Blog By Dr. Adrian Flynn(a) and Dr. Travis Dutka(b)

(a) Marine Ecologist and Director at Fathom Pacific

(b) Senior Lecturer at La Trobe University Department of Ecology, Environment, and Evolution.

The waters of Western Port in southeastern Australia are a recreational fishing haven and hidden beneath its turbid waters, a unique fragile seafloor community has been newly described.  Here, bryozoans, skeleton-forming filter-feeding organisms also known as ‘lace corals’, form expansive areas of reef that support a high diversity and abundance of macroinvertebrates important to snapper and other prized recreational fish species.

Figure 1: Underwater imagery of the bryozoan reefs revealed remarkable biogenic reef structures with abundant invertebrate life surrounded by large areas of bare sediment.

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Lowrance and BioBase informing Manatee Conservation in Lake Ossa, Cameroon Africa

Fascinating study recently published in the esteemed scientific journal Ecology and Evolution demonstrating how Lowrance HDS and BioBase were used to create the first bathymetric and vegetation map of Lake Ossa in Cameroon, Africa. These maps along with other environmental data collected by researchers were used to create a habitat suitability model for the charismatic African Manatee, whose populations are now threatened in Africa due to habitat degradation.

This is an open access journal from Wiley and available here for download.

Below is the abstract

African manatee (Trichechus senegalensis) habitat suitability at Lake Ossa, Cameroon, using trophic state models and predictions of submerged aquatic vegetation

First published: 07 October 2021

Abstract

The present study aims at investigating the past and current trophic status of Lake Ossa and evaluating its potential impact on African manatee health. Lake Ossa is known as a refuge for the threatened African manatees in Cameroon. Little information exists on the water quality and health of the ecosystem as reflected by its chemical and biological characteristics. Aquatic biotic and abiotic parameters including water clarity, nitrogen, phosphorous, and chlorophyll concentrations were measured monthly during four months at each of 18 water sampling stations evenly distributed across the lake. These parameters were then compared with historical values obtained from the literature to examine the dynamic trophic state of Lake Ossa. Results indicate that Lake Ossa’s trophic state parameters doubled in only three decades (from 1985 to 2016), moving from a mesotrophic to a eutrophic state. The decreasing nutrient gradient moving from the mouth of the lake (in the south) to the north indicates that the flow of the adjacent Sanaga River is the primary source of nutrient input. Further analysis suggests that the poor transparency of the lake is not associated with chlorophyll concentrations but rather with the suspended sediments brought-in by the Sanaga River. Consequently, our model demonstrated that despite nutrient enrichment, less than 5% of the lake bottom surface sustained submerged aquatic vegetation. Thus, shoreline emergent vegetation is the primary food available for the local manatee population. During the dry season, water recedes drastically and disconnects from the dominant shoreline emergent vegetation, decreasing accessibility for manatees. The current study revealed major environmental concerns (eutrophication and sedimentation) that may negatively impact habitat quality for manatees. The information from the results will be key for the development of the management plan of the lake and its manatee population. Efficient land use and water management across the entire watershed may be necessary to mitigate such issues.

Lake Ossa Bathymetric Map
First ever bathymetric map of Lake Ossa in Cameroon created with Lowrance HDS and BioBase. Lake map can be viewed in genesismaps.com/socialmap.

What sonar do I need for BioBase mapping?

What kind of sonar hardware should I buy for BioBase Mapping is the most common question we are asked. Admittedly, continual change in technology, products, and features can be intimidating and sometimes confusing. With this blog, we focus on what you need to know to get started with BioBase

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EcoSound New Feature: Advanced Processing Preferences

The rollout of the new BioBase EcoSound vegetation and bottom hardness algorithm required substantial refactoring of our core processing code. Read about the changes here. While we were under the hood, we took the opportunity to implement some enhancements that our frequent BioBase users should appreciate. NOTE: Users still select the unit (Imperial or Metric) in the primary user profile area of their BioBase account (My Account).

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BioBase EcoSound Vegetation and Bottom Hardness Algorithms Improved

Sonar technology continues to improve bringing anglers and aquatic managers better, more clear pictures of the underwater environment on which they are so intently focused. Launched in 2011, BioBase’s EcoSound technology was the first cloud aquatic mapping system designed to process sonar logs from off-the-shelf Lowrance® sonar and create maps of bathymetry, aquatic vegetation biovolume, and bottom hardness for aquatic resource professionals. Today, BioBase is the leading cloud software solution for automated lake and coastal seagrass mapping.

Between 2011 and 2014, the algorithm underwent five major revisions. The bottom hardness algorithm has undergone two major revisions, with the last one in 2014.  Thus, our code base was due for an overhaul in order to maintain performance and compatibility with newer generation Lowrance and Simrad sonar. This refactoring effort was also an opportunity for us to improve the vegetation and bottom hardness algorithms. Many of these improvements also carry over sister consumer technology C-MAP Genesis, which uses many of the same algorithms and backend processing architecture

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