Acoustic mapping and monitoring of the seabed: From single-frequency to multispectral multibeam backscatter

With the increasing human activities in the marine environment, such as fisheries, dredging, coastal protection or construction of marine infrastructure, seabed sediment and habitat mapping have become highly relevant for the development of sustainable marine management strategies. Compared to traditional mapping methods, primarily based on bed...

Mapping the seabed and shallow subsurface with multi-frequency multibeam echosounders

Multi-frequency multibeam backscatter (BS) has indicated, in particular for fine sediments, the potential for increasing the discrimination between different seabed environments. Fine sediments are expected to have a varying signal penetration within the frequency range of modern multibeam echosounders (MBESs). Therefore, it is unknown to...

Monitoring underwater nourishments using multibeam bathymetric and backscatter time series

Natural and man-induced coastal erosion endanger life and environment in coastal areas worldwide. For sedimentary barrier coasts, beach and underwater nourishments are an efficient coastal protection strategy. To optimize nourishments and to understand their impact on the marine environment, monitoring strategies are required. In this study,...

Performance of Multibeam Echosounder Backscatter-Based Classification for Monitoring Sediment Distributions Using Multitemporal Large-Scale Ocean Data Sets

Obtaining an overview of the spatial and temporal distribution of seabed sediments is of high interest for multiple research disciplines. Multibeam echosounders allow for the mapping of seabed sediments with high area coverage. In this paper, the repeatability of acoustic classification derived from multibeam echosounder backscatter is addressed...