Autonomous Seagrass Habitat Monitoring System (ASHMoS)

Collaborators HydroSurv Unmanned Survey (UK) Ltd and University of Plymouth Marine Institute are bringing together an expert team to combine HydroSurv's robotic survey technology and rapid development capabilities with an internationally recognised academic expertise in marine science to develop a groundbreaking solution for subtidal survey of submerged aquatic vegetation, putting a new end-to-end solution into the hands of UK coastal practioners for natural capital assessment and monitoring.

Driven by the well-publicised successes within their previous project for acoustic ground discrimination techniques for the monitoring of seagrass, the partnership will advance the accuracy of this novel technique bringing together a series of new datasets to assess the condition of benthic habitats and provide sediment characterisation alongside seagrass biomass estimation based on the validated needs of survey commissioners and data users within public, government and local authority organisations.

Central to the new approach is use of rapidly-deployable HydroSurv Uncrewed Surface Vessel (USV) platforms with electric propulsion, combined with an advanced sensor array to collect a range of hydroacoustic and observational measurements from a ground truthing instrument array. The use of deep learning algorithms is expanded from characterising the coverage, density and canopy height of seagrass to carrying out sediment analysis, whilst collecting complementary environmental datasets geolocated to the primary datasets. The data delivery builds upon HydroSurv's enterprise-scale GIS cloud application to enable users to monitor temporal changes without specialist data interrogation skills.

Staying true to HydroSurv's aim to democratise ocean data, the solution will slash the cost and carbon intensity of data collection relative to established survey techniques whilst removing personnel from harms way, and will be made flexibly and conveniently accessible to the market.