Tag: sonar

Announcing the BioBase Fish Mapping Layer: EcoFish!

 

Announcing EcoFish TM! A Game-Changing BioBase fish mapping layer powered by Echoview Software, the industry leader in fisheries hydroacoustic processing technology.

Now, anyone with a Lowrance® or Simrad® depth finder can generate detailed counts, depths, relative size, and location of fish. Not only that, but also at the same time with no additional work, acquire critical habitat details including surface water temperature, depth contours, bottom hardness, aquatic vegetation abundance, and detailed side-scan imagery of habitat. If you want the webinar version to learn more, check it out on our YouTube Channel, otherwise read on…

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Fit for Purpose: results from alternative sonar mapping platforms

Ray Valley(a) and Eli Kersh(b)

(a) BioBase Product Expert and Aquatic Biologist

(b) BioBase Ambassador, Certified Lake Manager, and President of LakeTech Inc.

The term “Fit for Purpose” has recently become a popular term in our circles in the context of mapping and surveying water bodies, and it refers to utilizing the appropriate equipment, methods, and budget for the task at hand.

This principle acknowledges that one type of equipment and method may not be suitable for every scenario. For instance, whether you’re assessing the storage volume of municipal stormwater ponds or maintaining a river channel for commercial navigation, the required level of accuracy will and should be different. While high accuracy and precision may be crucial for certain projects, it might not be necessary for others.

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Weeds and Seagrass: mysterious and underappreciated treasures of the sea

Given the disdain for the word “weed,” it’s not surprising that seaweed gets such little respect in most developed human cultures. But, we are finding seaweed and its rooted cousin seagrass hold immeasurable value for the future of humankind. Time to get to work mapping it!

Seagrasses are considered vascular plants and have roots, stems, leaves, and flowers. According to a report from the United Nations in 2020, there are more than 70 species across the globe covering over 300,000 km2 (which is likely a vast underestimate) making them one of the most widespread coastal habitats.

Figure 1. Posidonia seagrass growing off the Mediterranean Coast of Spain. See us map it

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What Is BioBase?

What Is BioBase?

What is BioBase? BioBase uses off-the-shelf sonar technology and automatic cloud processing to create professional bathymetry, bottom composition, and aquatic vegetation maps. BioBase removes the labor intensive and high cost elements of acquiring high quality data very quickly so you can focus your efforts on aquatic resource management.

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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 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. Researchers and Data Analysts 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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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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