Recent advances in deep-sea exploration with underwater vehicles have led to the discovery of vertical environments inhabited by a diverse sessile fauna. However, despite their ecological importance, vertical habitats remain poorly characterized by conventional downward-looking survey techniques. Here we present a high-resolution 3-dimensional habitat map of a vertical cliff hosting a suspension-feeding community at the flank of an underwater glacial trough. Using a forward-looking set-up on a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV), a high-resolution multibeam echosounder was used to map out the topography of the terrain, including, for the first time, the backscatter intensity. Navigational accuracy was improved through a combination of the USBL and the DVL navigation of the ROV. Multi-scale terrain descriptors were derived and assigned to a 3D point cloud. Following a top-down habitat mapping approach, the application of an unsupervised K-means clustering revealed four potential habitat types, driven by geomorphology, backscatter and fine-scale features. Using groundtruthing seabed images, the ecological significance of the four habitat clusters was assessed in order to evaluate the benefit of top-down habitat mapping for further fine-scale ecological studies of vertical environments. This study demonstrates the importance of a priori knowledge of the terrain around habitats that are rarely explored for ecological investigations. It also emphasizes the importance of remote characterization of habitat distribution for assessing the representativeness of benthic faunal studies often constrained by time-limited sampling activities. This case study also identifies current limitations (e.g. navigation accuracy, irregular terrain acquisition difficulties) that can potentially limit the use of a deep-sea terrain model for fine-scale investigations.

中文翻译：

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深海悬崖离岸格陵兰岛的高分辨率垂直栖息地制图

使用水下航行器进行深海勘探的最新进展导致发现了由多种无柄动植物组成的垂直环境。然而，尽管它们具有生态重要性，但垂直生境仍然缺乏常规的向下看的调查技术。在这里，我们呈现了一个高分辨率的3维栖息地地图，其中是一个垂直悬崖的悬崖，该悬崖在一个水下冰川槽的侧面拥有一个悬浮饲料饲养社区。使用遥控车辆（ROV）上的前瞻性装置，高分辨率多光束回声测深仪用于绘制地形图，包括首次包括反向散射强度。通过将USBL和ROV的DVL导航结合使用，可以提高导航精度。得出了多尺度地形描述符并将其分配给3D点云。按照自上而下的栖息地制图方法，无监督K均值聚类的应用揭示了四种潜在的栖息地类型，这是由地貌，反向散射和精细尺度特征驱动的。使用地面海床图像，评估了四个栖息地集群的生态意义，以评估自上而下的栖息地制图对垂直环境的进一步精细生态研究的益处。这项研究证明了对生境周围地形进行先验知识的重要性，而很少进行生态学调查。它还强调了对栖息地分布进行远程刻画的重要性，以评估通常受时间限制的采样活动限制的底栖动物研究的代表性。该案例研究还确定了当前的局限性（例如导航精度，不规则的地形获取困难），这些局限性可能会限制深海地形模型在精细调查中的使用。