Comprehensive Habitat Mapping of a Littoral Marine Park

Marine Protected Areas classification can help in the protection and monitoring of important ecosystems that might be sheltered by their habitats.New instrumentation techniques are being applied to study this type of environments, performing various scientific surveys in the water. In this paper we introduce a practical approach for habitat mapping, from the surface through the seabed, using autonomous underwater and unmanned aerial vehicles. We address high-resolution characterization of extensive coastal areas in challenging conditions by deploying multiple vehicles simultaneously. This approach has been applied in the field, to map a large coastal area, contouring the area intrinsic challenges by using a robust software toolchain developed to operate these vehicles, from planning and execution to the data analysis stages.