AUV Benthic Habitat Mapping in South Eastern Tasmania

Abstract

This paper describes a two week deployment of the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Sirius on the Tasman Peninsula in SE Tasmania and in the Huon Marine Protected Area (MPA) to the South West of Hobart. The objective of the deployments described in this work were to document biological assemblages associated with rocky reef systems in shelf waters beyond normal diving depths. At each location, multiple reefs were surveyed at a range of depths from approximately 50 m to 100 m depth. We illustrate how the AUV based imaging complements benthic habitat assessments to be made based on the ship-borne swath bathymetry. Over the course of the 10 days of operation, 19 dives were undertaken with the AUV covering in excess of 70 linear kilometers of survey and returning nearly 160,000 geo-referenced high resolution stereo image pairs. These are now being analysed to describe the distribution of benthic habitats in more detail.