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Exploring Great Lakes Benthoscapes: Can we visually delineate freshwater benthic communities?
Citation:
Burlakova, L., A. Karatayev, K. Mehler, S. Daniel, J. Nestlerode, E. Hinchey, M. Pawlowski, AND M. Wick. Exploring Great Lakes Benthoscapes: Can we visually delineate freshwater benthic communities? 2021 Conference on Great Lakes Research (International Association of Great Lakes Research, IAGLR), Virtual, May 17 - 21, 2021.
Impact/Purpose:
We present an update on a continued evaluation of benthos remote sensing approaches in support of the development of a reliable image-based index of environmental stress or benthic ecological condition for fresh water systems. Assessing ecological condition provides an approximation of relative ecological status that is spatially and temporally comparable. Identifying benthic ecosystem variability using both traditional taxonomic-based and novel image-based indicators gives insight into possible correlative agents of change and relevant ecological interactions with implications for ecosystem resiliency, stability and recovery. Image-based indicators could be incorporated into compliance and habitat status monitoring and aid assessment of lower food web health, effectively increasing the spatial scales sampled during the surveys and providing important data to resource managers.
Description:
Our limited knowledge of the type and ecological functioning of freshwater benthic habitats poses challenges for effective management to protect habitat and species diversity. Despite our increasing capability to map benthic habitats and extract structural information from mapping data, our ability to quantify biotic components, particularly for organisms living in the sediments, is constrained by the small spatial scale of traditional sampling. During the 2019 Lake Erie Cooperative Science and Monitoring Initiative benthic survey we enhanced the traditional collection of Ponar bottom grabs with rapidly-collected and analyzed underwater videos using Drop-down GoPro cameras and Sediment Profile Imaging camera. We classified benthic habitats based on analysis of the images for presence and relative abundance of benthic taxa, verified images against infauna data from Ponars, and compared results with water quality data collected at each station via the Sea-Bird profiler casts. Benthic taxa abundant in identified habitat types differed in their tolerance to hypoxia, indicating that near-bottom oxygen availability structures Lake Erie benthoscapes.