Hard-Soft Seafloor Classification, 40m - Swains, American Samoa

Preliminary hard and soft seafloor substrate map derived from an unsupervised classification of multibeam backscatter and bathymetry derivatives at Swains Island, American Samoa. The dataset was created from gridded (40 m cell size) multibeam bathymetry derivatives collected aboard R/V AHI, and NOAA ship Hi'ialakai; two scales of bathymetric variance and bathymetric rugosity. Backscatter data were from a 300 kHz Simrad EM300 and a 240 kHz Reson 8101 sonar, gridded at 5 m. Very limited seafloor photographs for groundtruthing are available for Swains Island and therefore no supervised classification was performed and we are unable to visually or empirically evaluate the accuracy of the unsupervised classification seafloor substrate map. However, in locations such French Frigate Shoals, NWHI, and Tutuila, American Samoa, where ground truth data are available, the unsupervised classification method is a robust predictor of substrate type in similar depth ranges and seafloor environments. Since groundtruthing was not used to validate the unsupervised classification at Swains Island extreme caution should be used when examining these data to locate habitat of biological significance. The map should be used in conjunction with bathymetric derivatives such as rugosity, slope, and Bathymetric Position Index (BPI).