Preliminary hard and soft bottom seafloor substrate map derived from an unsupervised classification of gridded backscatter and bathymetry derivatives of Ni'ihau Island, Hawaii, USA.

Preliminary hard and soft seafloor substrate map derived from an unsupervised classification of multibeam backscatter and bathymety derivatives of Ni'ihau Island, Hawaii, USA . The dataset was derived using Reson 8101 backscatter data, bathymetric variance and bathymetric rugosity. The sonar frequency is 240 kHz for the Reson 8101 backscatter data, which were resampled to a 5 m grid cell size prior to the classification. Limited seafloor photographs for groundtruthing are available for Ni'ihau 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.