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New ArcPro Coral Mound Mapping (CoMMa) Toolbox

What is the CoMMa Toolbox?

This is a new ArcPro Confined Morphologies Mapping (CoMMa) toolbox to semi-automatically map and characterise confined landforms (like cold-water coral mounds, pockmarks, drumlins etc.).

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What can you achieve while using the CoMMa Toolbox?

At present, the toolbox includes three tools. The toolbox allows you to:

1)  Pre-process multi-beam data and calculate local topographic parameters (i.e. bathymetric positioning index (BPI), directional and minimum median residuals) using the Auxiliaries tool (see Figure 1 below)

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Figure 1: Example of the three different types of derivatives that can be calculated using the CoMMa Toolbox (Arosio et al., 2022: New ArcPro Coral Mound Mapping (CoMMa) Toolbox. Presentation at the iAtlantic General Assembly, Florianopolis, Brazil, 10-14 October 2022).

2) Delineate potential features using the Delineation tool (see Figure 2 below)

Figure 2: Delineating potential mound features using the CoMMa Toolbox. The middle shows cold-water coral mounds delineated based on Bathymetric Positioning Index (red delineation). The right part shows cold-water coral mounds delineated based on minimum median residuals (yellow delineation). (Arosio et al., 2022: New ArcPro Coral Mound Mapping (CoMMa) Toolbox. Presentation at the iAtlantic General Assembly, Florianopolis, Brazil, 10-14 October 2022).

3) Describe the geomorphological characteristics of confined features using the basic, texture and volume descriptors tools. These characteristics include many parameters as the area, perimeter, width/length ratio, mean slope, vertical relief, mean depth, orientation, Polsby-Popper score for circularity, etc. – see Figure 3 below).

Figure 3: 3D image of the cold-water coral mini- mounds from the Mingulay reef complex (Arosio et al., 2022: New ArcPro Coral Mound Mapping (CoMMa) Toolbox. Presentation at the iAtlantic General Assembly, Florianopolis, Brazil, 10-14 October 2022).
Why is characterising seabed morphology important?

The extracted morphometric data can be used to understand spatial patterns in shape, biodiversity and environmental conditions (e.g. current speeds and direction) of seabed features such as cold-water coral mounds across the ocean.

For more information

Contact: For more information on CoMMa please contact Riccardo Arosio (rarosio[at]ucc.ie) or Joana Gafeira (jdlg[at]bgs.ac.uk).

Main contributors: The CoMMa Toolbox was created by Riccardo Arosio (University College Cork) and Joana Gafeira (British Geological Survey). The work is mainly funded by INFOMAR (www.infomar.ie) through the Irish Marine Institute’s research grant PDOC 19/08/03 (https://www.ucc.ie/en/marinegeology/projects/seabedmapping/nomanstif/) and the British Geological Survey. iAtlantic has also supported the creation of the toolbox.

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EU

This project has 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.