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New ArcPro Coral Mound Mapping (CoMMa) Toolbox

What is the CoMMa Toolbox?

This is  a new ArcPro Coral Mound Mapping (CoMMa) toolbox to semi-automatically map and characterise cold-water coral mounds.

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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 multibeam data and calculate derivatives (i.e. bathymetric positioning index (BPI), directional and minimum median residuals) using the Auxilaries 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 (De Clippele 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 mound 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). (De Clippele 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 cold-water coral mounds using the basic, texture and volume descriptors tools. These characteristics include the area, perimeter, width/length ratio, slope, vertical relief, BPI, depth, width, length, orientation, Polsby-Popper score for circularity, convex hull area, depth range, dissection index, texture, etc. – volume will be calculated using the Description tool see Figure 3 below).

Figure 3: 3D image of the cold-water coral mini- mounds from the Mingulay reef complex (De Clippele 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 cold-water coral mounds across the ocean.

For more information

Contact: Laurence De Clippele (laurence.de.clippele[at]ed.ac.uk)

Main contributors: Riccardo Arosio, Joana Gafeira, Laurence H. De Clippele, based at the University College Cork (Ireland), the British Geological Survey and the University of Edinburgh (UK)

 

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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.