Based at INSTAAR,
University of Colorado, Boulder
About the Project
dbSEABED creates unified, detailed mappings of the materials that make up the seafloor by efficiently integrating thousands of individual datasets. The goal is to bring decades of seabed information - and today's latest information - from marine geology, biology, engineering and surveys into one seabed mapping that can fulfil the community needs for ocean-bottom information on many spatial scales. The system deals with seabed texture, composition, acoustic properties, colour, geology and biology.
Many software tools can work on the rich integrated output data: Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Relational Databases (RDB), modeling, visualisation, and stratigraphic .
Huge data entry efficiencies come from a software-assisted process that prepares new data for entry with quality checks. As evidence of its efficiency, the US, Australian and global coverages together hold integrated data for over 3,000 datasets and 5 million described seafloor sites. The system is vendor-independent and code is shared, so the system will be a legacy well into the future.
The scope of the project is large: global extent, from shoreline to abyss, across all jurisdictions (national EEZs and international), with public and donated private data, numerical and text data types. Most of the data are from coastal settings.
An emphasis is placed on combating the biases which are common in this type of data - from device apertures, survey priorities, lab method choices. This is done by bringing in data from extremely diverse sources - research, survey, tourism, monitorings, management, fisheries, and conservation.
The first whole-of Arctic surficial sediment coverages are now available at various resolutions (August 2020). This particular coverage is of the sand fraction, interpolated on an x,y and z (water depth) inverse-distance metric. Points mark the presently available data sites.
dbSEABED is now able to produce mappings for any ocean region in any chosen map projection, such as this one, which is in IBCAO Polar Stereographic at resolution 10km cellsize.
A Google Earth interactive view of the provincial variations of exposed rock and seabed textures for the coastal zones of the states Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. It is one of the public data offerings from dbSEABED. The squares represent bins of data which is summarized by color and popup-bubbles (click).
To examine further, collect the project KMZ (LINK HERE) and drag it into GoogleEarth. The current version is v0.4 from 2025.
More Details on the Project
dbSEABED is operated by a number of cooperating institutions, who import, integrate, process and display regional datasets under a common format and software setup. They share data, code and innovations. Some organizations use dbSEABED on their secure premises where they add their own specialized datasets to the group data holdings.
Most incoming data are point-wise, so spatial resolution improves as more datasets are added. Gridded and vector mappings of the seafloor materials are computed from the point-data coverages. Accuracies are the same as for the original survey data; system precision is 1m; datum is WGS84.
Quality assurance is achieved by checks on data at data entry (including always, operator scrutiny), by error-trapping in the data-processing software, and by working the data intensively in various collaborative research programs. dbSEABED was devised to be robust in an inexact and incomplete information environment - marine geosciences. An uncertainty budget is calculated with map outputs.The most common applications are real input data for numerical models, ecological benthic habitat mappings, lithological compositions of sediments, sediment template to guide biogeochemical studies and budgets.
Coverage
Coverage is predominantly over continental shelf areas, but increasingly in coastal/inshore areas, while deep-sea areas are also given attention. Being for research, the data collection is whole-Earth - not limited by national restrictions.
Coverage extends to the substrates' texture parameters (gravel, sand, mud, rock, sediment grainsize and sorting), compositional aspects (carbonate, organic carbon), strength (porosity, strengths, erodabilities), and ages, colour, vegetation, components and features.
