dbSEABED creates unified, detailed
mappings
of the materials that make the seafloor by efficiently
integrating thousands of individual datasets. The goal is to bring
decades
of
seabed information - and today's information - from marine geology,
biology, engineering
and
surveys
into one seabed mapping that can fulfil the community needs for
ocean-bottom
information on many spatial scales. The system deals with
seabed
texture,
composition, acoustic properties, colour, geology and biology.
Many software tools can work on the rich
integrated data: Geographic Information Systems
(GIS), Relational Databases
(RDB), modeling, visualisation, and stratigraphic .
Huge data
entry efficiencies come from programs that prepare the data for use
in standard databases. As
evidence
of its efficiency, the US, Australian and global coverages together
hold integrated data for over 2,000 datasets and
2 million described seafloor sites. The system is
vendor-independent and code is shared, so the system will be a legacy
well
into the future.
The
scale of operation is local, national and global: shorelines,
bays,
seaways, national EEZ's, ocean basins, and worldwide. The
database deals with coastal, estuarine, inshore,
continental shelf, continental slope and very deep sea environments.
Point-data based, so spatial
resolution improves as more datasets
are
added.
Gridded and vector mappings of the seafloor materials are computed from
the point-data coverages. Accuracies are the same as for the original
survey
data; system precision is 1m; datum is WGS84.
dbSEABED is operated
by
a number of cooperating institutions, who import, integrate,
process
and display regional datasets under a common format and software setup.
They share data, code and innovations. Some organizations use dbSEABED
on their secure premises where they add their own specialized datasets
to
the
group data holdings.
Quality
assurance
is achieved by checks on data at data entry, by error-trapping in
the data-processing software, and by working the data intensively in
various
collaborative research programs. dbSEABED was devised to be robust in
an
inexact and incomplete information environment - marine geosciences. An
uncertainty budget is calculated with map outputs.
Advanced visualization
and data handling tools are available to collaborating members -
in 3D renditions, stratigraphic synthesis, statistics, databasing, GIS
tools, uncertainty analysis.
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(Click
to enlarge)
dbSEABED is adapting to
Google Earth (KML) forms of data delivery for projects. In 2006-7 the
Gulf
of Mexico coverages were boosted with assistance from the Gulf States
Marine Fisheries Commission, Ocean Springs MS and others. With GE tools
networked fisheries biologists across the five states can interrogate
seabed type - especially hard substrates
- at
230,000 sites using 0.1 degree bins. A full-featured GIS
geodatabase is also used in the labs.
The stratigraphic (subbottom) side of dbSEABED has
been developed for offshore resources and defence acoustics research.
Here CoreNavigator displays piston cores from the Gulf of Mexico that
were collected by TAMU and show hydrates, hydrocarbons.
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