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To look under the surface of the North Coast’s
near-shore undersea realm, a research team flew over the Humboldt
Bay region last week with high-tech cameras yielding
“hyperspectral imagery” of the submerged habitat.
The research is part of a project examining the 1,200-mile California
coast, from 100 meters deep in the water to 100 meters high on land, being
conducted by the Center for Integrated Coastal Observation Research and
Education – or CI-CORE, a collaboration of 11 institutions, including Humboldt State University.
The Oct. 25-28 flights began a three-week CI-CORE effort to collect data
along the entire California coast by a team
from Old Dominion University’s
Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department.
According to ODU Professor Richard Zimmerman, “This is an exciting
opportunity to use cutting-edge technologies to understand a part of the
ocean that is critical to managing coastal resources.”
Frank Shaughnessy, the HSU biology professor
coordinating the local portion of CI-CORE’s data
harvest, said, “The potential for getting high-quality descriptions of
eelgrass habitat within Humboldt Bay, and especially kelp habitat on the
outer coast, would be a huge step forward for Northern California, where
marine habitat maps are rare or nonexistent.”
Shaughnessy said CI-CORE data will help scientists
better understand coastal ocean dynamics and, in turn, help others manage the
commercial, recreational and environmental burdens placed on California’s coastal
resources by agriculture, industry and urban development.
Funded by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coastal
Observation Technology System, the effort will integrate data from the
coastal flights with other new and existing measurements, including those of
water temperature, photosynthesis, turbidity, salinity, nutrients and
plankton composition.
The flights, Shaugnessy said, will also yield
high-resolution maps of coastal and wetland regions derived from cameras
using hyperspectral imagery, which distinctly records many bands of light at
varying wavelengths simultaneously. HSI data has been gathered in flights
over a variety of environs, including wildlands,
agricultural fields, mineral deposits, oceans and, after the attacks of Sept.
11, 2001, the World
Trade Center.
Over the North Coast, it is expected to provide increased
detail of shoreline contours, ocean-bottom topography and vegetation.
Researchers liken the challenge of looking through the water from high
altitude to looking into a dark closet from across a brightly lit room. To
produce coastal data, the HSI measurements must be corrected for bright light
scattered by the atmosphere and reflected from the sea surface. To make this
adjustment, while the aircraft collects its data scientists aboard ships will
gather comparative measurements of the light just below the sea surface and
of color-inducing materials suspended in the water, such as algae and
sediments.
CI-CORE involves researchers from HSU and seven other California
State University
campuses, ODU, University
of Connecticut and the
Florida Environmental Research Institute. Together they are creating a
long-term observatory of ocean conditions. The upcoming field campaign will
include sites at Humboldt Bay, San Francisco
Bay, Monterey
Bay, Morro Bay,
San Luis
Bay, Santa Barbara,
Palos Verdes, Newport
Bay and San Diego.
HSU key roles in CI-CORE are to compile historical and long-term datasets
within its marine science programs, support monitoring programs, and work
with San Francisco State University
and San Jose State
University to establish a pier-based
data logging station in Humboldt Bay. The
datasets will come from long-term investigations of beach and intertidal ecology; marine mammal surveys; and surveys of
algae, invertebrates and fishes in Humboldt Bay.
For more information, see the CI-CORE Web site at http://www.cicore.org
or http://cicore.humboldt.edu
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