COmplex Deep-sea Environments: Mapping habitat heterogeneity As Proxy for biodiversity
A Starting Grant project supported by the European Research Council (ERC).
With the ever-increasing pressure on our Deep Oceans, there is a rising and urgent need for the quantification of deep-sea biodiversity:
- It is a major provider of goods and services
- As indicator of ecosystem status and functioning, it is a key aspect in fundamental understanding of deep-sea biology
- It is the basis for effective management and conservation, using an ecosystem approach.
However, assessing biodiversity in the Deep Ocean is a major challenge:
- Current methods are time consuming & expensive
- Scale issues: the limited coverage of individual cores and photographs makes it difficult to relate sampling results to large areas
- Underestimation of biodiversity in complex terrains: ecosystem hotspots such as canyons and coral reefs contain true 3D terrain that cannot be surveyed with conventional, ship-deployed sampling gear.
CODEMAP searches for alternative methods to quantify deep-sea biodiversity. The aim is
- To develop a robust, integrated and fully 3D methodology to map complex deep-sea habitats, using a combination of acoustic and visual techniques
- To quantify the heterogeneity of those habitats at a variety of scales, and establish statistical relationships between those scales
- To test the potential of habitat heterogeneity as proxy for epibenthic megafauna biodiversity
