Preliminary hard and soft bottom seafloor substrate map (40m grid) derived from an unsupervised classification of gridded backscatter and bathymetry derivatives at Rose Atoll, Territory of American Samoa, USA.

Preliminary hard and soft seafloor substrate map derived from an unsupervised classification of multibeam backscatter and bathymetry derivatives at Rose Atoll, Territory of American Samoa, USA. The dataset was created from gridded (40 m cell size) multibeam bathymetry derivatives collected aboard R/V AHI; 2 scales of bathymetric variance and bathymetric rugosity, and from multibeam backscatter. Backscatter data were from a 30 kHz Simrad EM300 sonar, gridded at 5 m. Very limited seafloor photographs for groundtruthing are available for Rose Atoll 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. Since groundtruthing was not used to validate the unsupervised classification at Rose Atoll extreme caution should be used when examining these data to locate habitat of biological significance. The map should be used in conjunction with bathymetric derivatives such as rugosity, slope, and Bathymetric Position Index (BPI).