Why Benthic Mapper?
With the gross pollution of the Hudson River now largely cleaned up, resources damaged by decades of pollution must be repaired and the ecosystem maintained for the future. Benthic Mapper is a publicly-available tool that will help create the detailed understanding of subsurface features critical to effective management of this rich and complex resource. Studying a river from its surface reveals little more about underwater features and dynamics than an airplane flight above the clouds shows of mountains, roads and human movements on the earth’s surface. To picture for the first time the subsurface world of the Hudson River, the Benthic Mapping Project is conducting systematic underwater measurements, displayed through Benthic Mapper’s Data Layers. Expert interpretations of the measurements are revealing additional subsurface features, displayed as the Interpretive Layers. Both types of layers contain information conducive to understanding the river’s biological dynamics. Combining lay
