Tim Battista is the Project Manager for the Biogeography Branch at NOAA's National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science. Recently he completed work validating derived benthic classification techniques (i.e. rugosity & slope) with information obtained from drop video surveys for the near-shore benthic habitats in the U.S. Virgin Islands. To demonstrate this validation, the data collected by multi-beam echosounding system aboard the NOAA ship Nancy Foster and video and photographic data collected by a towed ROV was integrated into Eonfusion. The result is a unique approach to ground-truthing data.
