The Azor Drift-Cam
What is the Azor drift-cam?
The Azor drift-cam is a low-cost, user-friendly underwater video system to visually survey deep-sea benthic habitats down to 1,000 m depth. The Azor drift-cam is made with off-the-shelf components, taking advantage of the small action cameras available in the market. It was designed to reflect the reality of the Azores, which meant being cost-effective, covering as much ground as possible in each deployment, performing well over rough terrains, being suitable to be operated from small local vessels and being able to escape abandoned or lost fishing lines after getting entangled. The system has two action cameras (one of which provides a live feed to the surface), powerful LED lights, a parallel laser system for image scaling and a temperature/depth sensor. All components are attached to a stainless-steel structure, which has 4 curved bars to provide protection in the case of collision with rocks or entanglement with fishing lines (see Figure below). All electronic components are battery-fed to avoid sending electricity through the cable, thus further decreasing the risks associated with its use. The system does not use its own propulsion (like ROVs) and does not require being towed from a vessel at constant slow speeds (like towed cameras). It is designed to take advantage of the drift of the support vessel generated by the wind and surface currents. The total cost to produce a full system, also considering enough spare parts in case of breakages, is below €15K. The Azor drift-cam has now been fully demonstrated and successfully tested during several cruises in the Azores, not only from medium-sized research vessels, but also from local fishing boats – the latter help us increase our capacity to survey areas close to shore by keeping the operational costs very low and benefiting from the local fishers’ knowledge
What has been achieved while successfully deploying the Azor drift-cam?
In the last 4 years, the Azores Deep-Sea Research Group from the University of the Azores has performed 500+ dives with the Azor drift-cam in seamounts, ridges and island slopes within the limits of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Azores. In around 100 days of work at sea, more than 300 km of seabed down to 1,000 m depth have been explored, generating 430+ hours of new video footage of deep-sea benthic habitats. Several of the seamounts and island slopes explored so far are home to structurally complex assemblages, which include diverse cold-water coral gardens, sponge grounds and a wide variety of associated fish species (see image below). The collected images will advance our understanding of the diversity and, especially, the spatial distribution of deep-sea benthic species and communities in the Azores. In fact, the video footage recorded during the summer of 2019 has already generated more than 8,700 new occurrence records of deep-sea benthic species from several seamounts along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and we can expect that the footage collected in all dives will surpass 100K new occurrence records once all images are analysed. During the recent MapGES 2022 cruise in areas of the western, eastern and central islands of the Azores (the relevant cruise report has been published by Morato et al., 2022; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7075749), the team managed to get more than 130 underwater video transects between 190 and 1,099 m depth in areas that had never been explored before. This added up to around 130 new hours of underwater video footage of deep-sea benthic habitats.
What are the benefits of using the Azor drift-cam?
The Azor drift-cam aims to provide a simple yet versatile tool to facilitate the access to deep-sea exploration. It does not intend to become a substitute for other, more sophisticated, video and photography platforms, but rather a complement. The Azor drift-cam could allow for rapid assessments of deep seabed areas along large geographic extents to identify ecologically relevant locations, which could subsequently be explored in more detail with ROVs, hence optimising and reducing operation costs. The performance of the Azor drift-cam in recent research cruises proves that this system could play a key role in attaining international commitments for the protection of marine biodiversity through the generation of deep-sea scientific data at reasonable cost, which should lead to a more sustainable use of marine resources and the conservation of deep-sea benthic habitats. The system should also help in the implementation of the Deep-Ocean Observing Strategy and the measurement of some of the essential variables for deep-sea monitoring and conservation strategies.
For more information
If you want more information, do not hesitate to contact Telmo Morato (t.morato[at]gmail.com), Carlos Dominguez-Carrió (carlosdominguezcarrio[at]gmail.com), based at the University of the Azores (Portugal) – but please also check out the following resources:
- The development of the Azor drift-cam system is described in detail in the open-access peer-reviewed publication ‘A cost-effective video system for a rapid appraisal of deep-sea benthic habitats: The Azor drift-cam: https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13617
- You can watch the Azor drift-cam YouTube promo video and short clips recorded with the system in several seamounts of the Azores here: https://www.youtube.com/@AzoresDeepSea
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This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 818123 (iAtlantic). This output reflects only the author’s view and the European Union cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.