Summary: The Great Barrier Reefs

By mapping the geomorphological features of the ocean and sea floors and then combining this data with biological data and direct observations we can begin to develop predictive habitat maps which predict the potential distribution of the benthic ecosystem which has an enormous impact upon ecosystem management, conservation and potential infrastructure. Each species of animal has a specific set of environmental constraints to which it can live this is known as a species niche (Harris, n.d.). The Great Barrier Reef is a great example to look at when discussing predictive habitat mapping as we can look at the near sea surface coral reefs compared to the submerged reefs, this is discussed in (Harris, n.d.) where they mapped geomorphology of the

banks to a 100 metre resolution, this revealed that only 37% of the submerged banks were covered in near sea surface reefs the other 63% was at a depth of approximately 27 meters. To identify how much of the remaining 63% of the reef could potentially contain coral a high-resolution multibeam sonar was used which is a device that maps the sea-floor using small pulses of sound to read the “footprints” of the seabed and can produce backscatter data and the bathymetry with a resolution of 3 metres to a depth of 150 metres this is available due to the fact that hard substrata like coral is easily separated from the soft sediment due to their different hardness’s (Zhi et al., 2014). Using the high-resolution