Conferència organitzada conjuntament CSIC-UB
Sala de conferències de l'Institut Jaume Almera (CSIC)
Divendres, 13 d'abril de 2007 a les 12.00 hores.

Per Vera Van Lancker, Ghent University, Renard Centre of Marine Geology.

With regard to habitat mapping, Ghent University has been involved in a number of projects in a national and international context. Given the limited size of the Belgian Continental Shelf, various observation and modelling techniques have been applied, both on the small- and the large-scale. The approaches have been successfully validated in Dutch and UK waters, where soft substrata habitats dominate and where a good correlation exists between the sediment nature and the occurrence of macrobenthic communities. An overview will be given of various methodologies to predict the occurrence of macrobenthos in soft substrata habitats: (1) prediction of macrobenthic communities based on very-high resolution side-scan sonar in combination with multibeam; (2) probability mapping of macrobenthic communities over the entire Belgian shelf based on high resolution physical data layers and a habitat model; (3) defining biologically relevant marine landscapes based on desktop modelling o Emphasis will be put on the importance of the physical datasets in view of producing biologically relevant habitat maps. Still, the products are a result of an intense cooperation between the Renard Centre of Marine Geology and the Marine Biology Section of Ghent University.