Benthic Structures

Submitted by ellen on

Benthic structures are artificial features in the offshore environment that disrupt benthic habitat and include moored buoys, channel markers, offshore cables and pipelines. The primary source of input data was NOAA Electronic Navigational Charts (ENC) available as of 2016. Point features for buoys, beacons, piles, etc. were extracted from a total of 21 ENC layers and merged together. Line features for underwater cables from 3 ENC layers were merged together and hand edited for consistency across chart borders. Polygons for the Barbers Point oil pipelines (southwest O‘ahu) were extracted from NOAA habitat maps, and polygons for areas containing multiple cables, pipelines, or buoys were extracted from three NOAA ENC layers. All features were assigned a value relative to the estimated amount of seafloor they disrupt within a 100 m raster cell ranging from 0.001 (piles) to .1 (pipelines). All features were converted to raster, summing values when more than one benthic structure occurred in the same raster pixel. 

 

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habitat destruction