Grant: Discovery Launch Supplement

Seafloor composition information is fundamental to understanding the functioning of marine ecosystems and for informing effective conservation and management initiatives. This information is often not available at sufficient resolutions for such applications at regional scales. Over the next five years, my research program will aim to fill this critical knowledge gap by providing high-resolution seafloor geospatial data products to support regional marine management and science priorities in Atlantic Canada. Support of these priorities additionally enables progress towards Canadian national 2030 conservation targets, and towards an improved understanding of broad scale surficial geology and marine ecology. This program comprises three integrated objectives that will produce relevant and actionable information describing the composition of the seafloor. First, exploration and development of novel high-resolution seabed substrate mapping technologies and approaches will improve capacity to study the spatial and temporal dynamics of heterogeneous seabed environments. Coastal environments in particular provide many important socio-economic and ecological services, but are also highly complex and non-uniform in space. There is a great need to develop technologies and methods that increase the efficiency with which geological and geochemical seabed information is obtained for these environments. Second, novel geospatial data products describing seafloor composition will be generated at priority areas in Atlantic Canada to inform scientific and management activities. Geospatial modelling techniques will be applied to predict substrate parameters over extensive areas via calibration of remote sensing data (e.g., sonar, satellite imagery). Priority areas of regional significance such as the Jordan Basin Conservation Area and the Newfoundland Grand Banks will be investigated in collaboration with project partners, and novel methods explored through the first objective will be leveraged where appropriate to model key geological and geochemical parameters in space. Third, we will enable access to new and existing seafloor data products through data compilation and fusion. Seabed substrate parameters have already been mapped at a high resolution for some areas of Atlantic Canada; it is desirable to integrate such work with outputs from the second objective to support broader regional science initiatives such as oceanographic modelling and habitat mapping. This can be challenging given differences in multi-source data characteristics. Data fusion approaches grounded in the fundamentals of geostatistics will be developed in order to integrate previous and contemporary geospatial model outputs. Importantly, we will develop and curate a data repository in accordance with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles to enhance accessibility of data products for scientists and managers as a significant component of this program.