MBON: Benthic percent cover in the Santa Barbara Channel

This study aims to quantify the percent cover of sessile species from shallow rocky reefs along the coast of Santa Barbara Channel, including the Channel Island National Park monitoring sites. BisQue (Bio-Imagery Semantic Query User Environment, a cloud-based analysis platform) was used to analyzed over 1500 images taken between 2013 and 2015 on the shallow reefs. This is the first phase of a bigger project that directs to improve the image analysis to complement or replace time-consuming in-situ surveys by divers. This data set contains percent cover and occurrence data of invertebrates, algae and fish from 22 subtidal rocky reef sites (Anacapa Landing, Arroyo Burro, Arroyo Quemado, Carpinteria, Cathedral Cove, Cuyler-Bat Rock, Diablo, Ellwood Mesa, Fry’s, Gull Island, Hazards, Isla Vista, Johnsons Lee-North, Mohawk, Naples, Pelican, Prisoners, Rhodes, Scorpion, Solimar, West-End and Cat Rock, Yellowbank). One survey image was collected at each site. Images were processed from 2015-2017 using BisQue with over 300 unique identifying tags. Data are organized in two tables (1) percent cover, (2) occurrence (present-absent).