Image courtesy of Norman Vine at http://www.vso.cape.com/~nhv/
Video survey map, 2003. The hatched area indicates about
2000 stations on a three-nautical mile grid. |
Since 1999 SMAST scallop researchers, with members of the commercial
sea scallop industry, support from the Massachusetts Division of Marine
Fisheries
and the sea scallop TAC-set-aside program (NOAA grants), have completed
26 video and tagging cruises to Georges Bank. These cruises have resulted
in 700 hours of video footage and 17,000 digital images covering 7500
km2 of
sea floor
at a 1.5 km (0.85 nautical miles) resolution. This database provides
assessments of scallop and other macroinvertebrate abundance, size structure,
spatial distribution, plus sediment and habitat distributions in closed
and open fishing areas of Georges Banks from 1999 onward.
With
funds from the Department of Marine Fisheries and strong support from
the industry we are expanding these surveys beginning in May 2003. We
will
survey
the
scallop
aggregations
from Virginia to the Hague line (the boarder between US and Canadian
waters) on a three-nautical mile grid totaling about 2000 stations, indicated
by the hatched area in the survey map. At each station four video
images of the sea floor will be collected.
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