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Recognition and Assessment of Seafloor Vegetation Using a Single Department of Imaging and Applied Physics Centre for Marine Science and Technology Recognition and assessment of seafloor vegetation using a single beam echosounder Yao-Ting Tseng This thesis is presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Curtin University of Technology February 2009 Signature: ……………………………… Date: ……………………………… i ii Dedicate to Chien-Youh, Yi-Yen, Jun-Sen, Yu-Cheng and Fu-Chen iii Acknowledgments In this study, I firstly give my great thanks to emeritus professor John Penrose. It is him who provided an opportunity for me to secure a scholarship for this study. Secondly, my major supervisor, Professor Alexander Gavrilov, is the one who had generously provided his support for my study. His knowledge and expertise in marine acoustics provided me with a living reference resource. Persons who had provided helps on this study all should be acknowledged. They include Dr. Alec Duncan, Dr. Rob McCauley, Dr. Gary Kendrick from University of Western Australia, Dr. Justy Siwabessy, and Mr. Andrew Woods. They were the key members involved in my study. Besides these, technicians such as Mr. Frank Thomas, Mr. Malcolm Perry, and Mr. Amos Maggi deserve mention for their great support for the project-related tasks. Thanks also go to the Centre’s administration secretary Mrs. Ann Smith. Colleagues such as Susan Rennie, Chris van Etten, Iain Parnum, Miles Parsons, Matthew Legg, and many friends had provided their helpful comments on my study. Their company in the office and their encouragement provided invaluable help for me to complete this study. Key members from the Cooperative Research Centre for Coastal Zone, Estuary and Waterway Management (Coastal CRC) deserve thanks for their great support of my research work. They include Chief Executive Officer Dr. Rob Fearon, Executive Assistant Mr. Paul Pinjuh, and Post Graduate Student Coordinator Ms Theresa Leijten. During my study period, the scholarship support from the Coastal CRC provided me great opportunities to engage with the Coastal Water Habitat Mapping project and to participate in many national and international academic activities. The knowledge and experience acquired from these engagements will definitely bring advantages and advancements for my future development. In concluding this work, Mr. Brett Grobaski provided his help on the tedious proofreading task. I appreciate his support when he was also preparing for his wedding in Taiwan. i For the completion of chapter five, I would like to express my gratitude to Michael Harwerth from Germany, Sara Silva from Portugal, Peter Day and Helen Gray from UK, Erick Cantu-Paz from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Ruixiang Sun from China, and many experts from the Genetic Programming community in providing helpful suggestions for me to commence the study of Genetic Programming. Thanks to the major author of GPLAB and many experts in this area in generously providing their comments for the application of GP on this particular study. Through their invaluable comments, I was finally able to have some Genetic Programming study results for marine science and make this study different. Taiwanese friends in Western Australia provided help for me to better adapt to Australia’s culture. Thanks for the enthusiastic help from the Taiwanese Chamber of Commerce of Western Australia and the Curtin Taiwanese Students Association. It was a very warm experience from the engagements with those friends in practicing the same cultural activities. I heartily appreciate their supports and cares during our living in Western Australia. I extend my acknowledgment to Miss Christine Cooper in Brisbane for her suggestion that I could have my study in Australia. Without her suggestion, I wouldn’t have this chance to start this study. Lastly, I would like to express my gratitude to my family members. My children stayed most of time with me in the study period from 2003 till the end of 2005 in Australia. They were the core of my daily life. We shared the same joys and disappointments within this study period. Through the daily engagement, they gained their invaluable experiences from their stay and studies in Australia. Instead of the author, it is them who had given me much help in dealing with the daily life so that I was able to concentrate my whole energy on my study. Lastly but surely not the least, my wife is the person who has greatly supported me so that I could restart my study again after 15-year’s leave from the university. Thanks go to her encouragement and her endurance of our long term separation during this study. She deserves my most gratitude. ii Abstract This study focuses on the potential of using a single beam echosounder as a tool for recognition and assessment of seafloor vegetation. Seafloor vegetation is plant benthos and occupies a large portion of the shallow coastal bottoms. It plays a key role in maintaining the ecological balance by influencing the marine and terrestrial worlds through interactions with its surrounding environment. Understanding of its existence on the seafloor is essential for environmental managers. Due to the important role of seafloor vegetation to the environment, a detailed investigation of acoustic methods that can provide effective recognition and assessment of the seafloor vegetation by using available sonar systems is necessary. One of the frequently adopted approaches to the understanding of ocean environment is through the mapping of the seafloor. Available acoustic techniques vary in kinds and are used for different purposes. Because of the wide scope of available techniques and methods which can be employed in the field, this study has limited itself to sonar techniques of normal incidence configuration relative to seafloors in selected regions and for particular marine habitats. For this study, a single beam echosounder operating at two frequencies was employed. Integrated with the echosounder was a synchronized optical system. The synchronization mechanism between the acoustic and optical systems provided capabilities to have very accurate groundtruth recordings for the acoustic data, which were then utilized as a supervised training data set for the recognition of seafloor vegetation. In this study, results acquired and conclusions made were all based on the comparison against the photographic recordings. The conclusion drawn from this investigation is only as accurate as within the selected habitat types and within very shallow water regions. In order to complete this study, detailed studies of literature and deliberately designed field experiments were carried out. Acoustic data classified with the help of the synchronized optical system were investigated by several methods. Conventional methods such as statistics and multivariate analyses were examined. Conventional iii methods for the recognition of the collected data gave some useful results but were found to have limited capabilities. When seeking for more robust methods, an alternative approach, Genetic Programming (GP), was tested on the same data set for comparison. Ultimately, the investigation aims to understand potential methods which can be effective in differentiating the acoustic backscatter signals of the habitats observed and subsequently distinguishing between the habitats involved in this study. iv Table of contents Acknowledgments......................................................................................................... i Abstract .......................................................................................................................iii Table of contents.......................................................................................................... v List of figures ............................................................................................................... x List of tables............................................................................................................... xx Glossary of symbols................................................................................................. xxii Chapter 1 Introduction............................................................................................... 1 1.1 Background and significance....................................................... 1 1.2 Research objectives...................................................................... 3 1.3 Thesis structure............................................................................ 3 Chapter 2 Historical studies of seafloor vegetation and the substrate ....................... 5 2.1 Acoustic studies of seafloor vegetation ....................................... 5 2.1.1 Introduction of marine benthos..................................... 5 2.1.2 Animal benthos............................................................. 6 2.1.3 Plant benthos................................................................. 8 2.1.3.1 Hydrilla and Lyngbya: a historical study... 8 2.1.3.2 A modelling study for algae....................... 9 2.1.3.3 Areal studies for seagrass and macro algae11 2.1.3.3.1 Australia................................ 12 2.1.3.3.2 Canada................................... 13 2.1.3.3.3 France.................................... 15 2.1.3.3.4 Italy ....................................... 16 2.1.3.3.5 Japan...................................... 19 2.1.3.3.6 Poland.................................... 20 2.1.3.3.7 Spain...................................... 24 2.1.3.3.8 USA....................................... 26 2.2 Seagrass in Western
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