How well do rapid assessment techniques and other surrogates reflect patterns in seabed biodiversity?
The current lack of knowledge of biodiversity living on continental shelf seabeds makes conservation planning and management for sustainability in these areas a difficult and largely subjective task. Without this knowledge, it can also be difficult to justify management actions to stakeholders. Therefore rigorous and reliable baseline information is an imperative for management and conservation, including representative systems of protected areas. The cost of biological surveys is a major consideration and alternative, “rapid assessment” techniques, have been sought. We report on an analysis of a previous series of seabed habitat and biodiversity surveys on a tropical shelf, as guidance to planned future surveys. Multiple survey devices were used, including: acoustics, towed video, epibenthic sled, prawn trawl and fish trawl. The biological sampling provided a detailed reference inventory of the distribution and abundance of the constituent biota. This biodiversity reference benchmark
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