Seabed Biodiversity on the Continental Shelf of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area (Towed Video)

The seabed habitat, marine plant and sessile megabenthos cover of the 200,000 km² area of the GBR shelf seabed was observed by a 500 m transect of a Drop-Camera video system at 1210 sites, representing a full range of known physical environments, during six 1-month-long voyages on the AIMS vessel Lady Basten. Continuous underway coding during transects recorded cover of 9 substrata types, 26 biohabitat types, and occurrence of 12 faunal classes. Laboratory post-analysis of the video recorded more detail at ~30 random frames per transect, including: 11 physical topography types, 23 substratum types, 115 biological types -- the dataset comprises 176,000 records site-by-type records. In addition, during most transects, digital still photographs were taken at 5-15 second intervals with strobes, and CTD data were recorded.