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16 Cold-Water Coral Habitat Mapping in the Mediterranean Sea: Methodologies and Perspectives

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Mediterranean Cold-Water Corals: Past, Present and Future

Part of the book series: Coral Reefs of the World ((CORW,volume 9))

Abstract

The marine scientific community developed new habitat mapping procedures that proved to be effective to map seafloor habitats in a holistic manner, thus refining our knowledge of benthic sea life. Several works on this topic focused on cold-water coral habitats at the global scale, with focus on the Atlantic Ocean while, only a few studies applied these methods to the Mediterranean Sea. The prime objective of this chapter is to comment the methodologies used to describe cold-water coral habitats and map their extension; secondly we discuss statistical models to outline the most suitable areas for cold-water coral settlement (habitat suitability models). Furthermore, recent technological developments in habitat mapping procedures provide geophysical data and seafloor images of higher resolution than ever before, while multi-frequency systems supply new hyperspectral images of the seabed. This new type of data could be crucial for a better characterisation of such Mediterranean cnidarian habitats. Here we reviewed the procedures for the Mediterranean cold-water coral habitat mapping applied so far, describing two case studies in the Southern Adriatic Sea and discussing caveats and future perspectives.

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Acknowledgements

We are indebted to editor Covadonga Orejas, Stefan Ekehaug and an anonymous reviewer for their critical comments that significantly helped to improve the present chapter. English language has been kindly revised and improved by William McKiver. This paper is ISMAR-Bologna scientific contribution n. 1930 and is part of EU F.P. VII Projects CoCoNet, (contract no. 287844), and EVER-EST (grant agreement no. 674907), DG Environment programme IDEM (grant agreement No. 11.0661/2017/750680/SUB/EN V.C2), and the Flag Project Ritmare (Ricerca Italiana per il Mare) projects.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Marine Sciences (ISMAR-CNR), Bologna, Italy

    Lorenzo Angeletti, Annaëlle Bargain, Elisabetta Campiani, Federica Foglini, Valentina Grande, Elisa Leidi, Alessandra Mercorella, Mariacristina Prampolini & Marco Taviani

  2. Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, USA

    Marco Taviani

  3. Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Naples, Italy

    Marco Taviani

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  1. Lorenzo Angeletti
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  8. Mariacristina Prampolini
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Correspondence to Mariacristina Prampolini .

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  1. Instituto Español de Oceanografía (IEO), Centro Oceanográfico de Baleares, Palma de Mallorca, Spain

    Covadonga Orejas

  2. Enalia Physis Environmental Research Centre (ENALIA), Nicosia, Cyprus

    Carlos Jiménez

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Angeletti, L. et al. (2019). 16 Cold-Water Coral Habitat Mapping in the Mediterranean Sea: Methodologies and Perspectives. In: Orejas, C., Jiménez, C. (eds) Mediterranean Cold-Water Corals: Past, Present and Future. Coral Reefs of the World, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91608-8_16

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