MarineGEO Benthic Photoquadrats Protocol

The relative space occupied by sessile animals and seaweeds on the seabed is measured as benthic cover, which provides data on community composition, diversity, and distribution of habitat-forming foundation species. To quantify benthic cover, we record photoquadrats in situ in a standardized format, and use image processing to calculate the percent cover of each organism and substrate type.

MarineGEO has adapted these photoquadrat methods from Reef Life Survey, an international monitoring network of coral and subtidal rocky reefs. For post-processing, users will upload and process their photoquadrats in CoralNet, an online repository that uses computer vision algorithms to automate image scoring. Further, MarineGEO has adopted the standardized vocabulary developed under the Collaborative and Automated Tools for Analysis of Marine Imagery (CATAMI) project to make these data comparable, long-lived, and useful across studies.

This assay determines relative community dominance of benthic organisms, measured as the percent cover and identity of organisms and substrate types in each replicate photoquadrat.