You cannot protect what you cannot see, and much of the life along a coast is on the bottom, under water. Benthic habitat maps exist to make it visible. They chart the plants, animals and seafloor of shallow coastal areas so that the people deciding how to manage those places know what is there.
A benthic habitat map for the Pacific Island Territories. Credit: NOAA.
What "benthic" means
Benthic describes anything associated with, or living on, the bottom of a body of water. The plants and animals that live on or in that bottom are called the benthos. A benthic habitat map, then, is a map of the bottom and of what lives there.
Where mapping happens, and why there
In the ocean, the areas mapped most often are near the shore and in estuaries. Two reasons meet here. The water is shallow enough to map, and these are among the areas that matter most to preserve and manage.
How a map is made
No single instrument produces one. Mapmakers combine aerial imagery, underwater photographs, acoustic surveys and data from samples of the sediment itself. The result is a digital map, read with geographic information system (GIS) tools, where each layer of evidence adds to the picture of the bottom.
Who uses them
Policy makers, scientists and researchers rely on these maps when they decide how to protect the nation's fragile shallow-water coastal areas. A map turns a stretch of water that looks uniform from the surface into a set of distinct habitats — and makes it possible to judge what a decision about that water will affect.
Sources
Based on "What is a benthic habitat map?" from NOAA's National Ocean Service, a work of the United States government in the public domain.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from oceanservice.noaa.gov
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