Overview

Geoscience Australia’s Semi-automated Morphological Mapping Tools

Seabed characterisation requires the measurement, description and classification of physical features on the seabed. A key first step in this process is the identification of morphological forms, as derived from bathymetry data. To facilitate rapid and consistent morphological mapping, Geoscience Australia has developed several semi-automated ArcGIS Python toolboxes that:

  • Generate polygons from bathymetry surfaces that represent bathymetric high and bathymetric low seabed features

  • Calculate metrics/attributes to describe the characteristics of the feature polygons

  • Classify individual polygons into one of the bathymetric high or low seabed morphological feature types

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The toolboxes adopt the suite of terms as presented in the glossary of seabed morphology features defined by [Dove et al., 2020].

Dove, D., Nanson, R., Bjarnadóttir, L., Guinan, J., Gafeira, J., Post, A., Dolan, M.; Stewart, H.; Arosio, R, Scott, G.. (2020). A two-part seabed geomorphology classification scheme (v.2); Part 1: morphology features glossary. Zenodo..

The detailed description of the GA-SaMMT and its applications to serveral real-world case studies are presented in [Huang et al., 2023].

Huang Z, Nanson R, McNeil M, Wenderlich M, Gafeira J, Post A and Nichol S (2023) Rule-based semiautomated tools for mapping seabed morphology from bathymetry data. Front. Mar. Sci. 10:1236788. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2023.1236788.