Did you know WASSP Multibeam is a powerful tool for gathering water column information for marine & fisheries sciences?

WASSP Multibeam systems together with ECHOVIEW Hydroacoustic software become a very powerful tool for gathering water column information for scientific study. 

• surveying & identifying fish school distribution
• conduct regular surveys for quantitative assessment of fish & weed abundance
• allows for pre & post data sets to compare. 

A recent study with WASSP & ECHOVIEW came up with a novel way to use our Multibeam Echosounder (MBES) technology to calculate mean school thickness. MBES was effective in modelling the distribution of schooling fish around an artificial reef and was able to delineate ecologically meaningful peaks and boundaries in the distribution of fish schools around the reef field.

“MBES was effective in modelling the distribution of schooling fish around an artificial reef and was able to delineate ecologically meaningful peaks and boundaries in the distribution of fish schools around the reef field. Extraction of three-dimensional targets based on a threshold dB value and subsequently projecting their vertical distribution onto a grid represents a novel approach for working with this large, uncalibrated, and often noisy data to address quantitative ecological questions. While the three dimensional visualizations generated by MBES can be useful for interpretation, depth-aggregation into a two-dimensional grid of school thickness facilitates spatial calculations and statistical approaches that would otherwise be computationally impractical”.  
- Characterizing the three-dimensional distribution of schooling reef fish with a portable multibeam echosounder (Download full White Paper from the link below) 

WASSP & ECHOVIEW software was also used by Auckland University to study the water column above the Hunga Volcanic Caldera in Tonga. Note the thermal plumes on the WASSP sounder below. 

Contact Dave James for further information: davej@enl.co.nz