Cold-water coral multiscale habitat mapping: methodologies and perspectives

The marine scientifc community developed new habitat mapping procedures that proved to be effective to map seafloor habitats in a holistic manner, thus refning our knowledge of benthic sea life. Several works on this topic focused on cold-water coral habitats at the global scale, with focus on the Atlantic Ocean while, only a few studies applied these methods to the Mediterranean Sea. The prime objective of this chapter is to comment the methodologies used to describe cold-water coral habitats and map their extension; secondly we discuss statistical models to outline the most suitable areas for cold-water coral settlement (habitat suitability models). Furthermore, recent technological developments in habitat mapping procedures provide geophysical data and seafloor images of higher resolution than ever before, while multi-frequency systems supply new hyperspectral images of the seabed. This new type of data could be crucial for a better characterisation of such Mediterranean cnidarian habitats. Here we reviewed the procedures for the Mediterranean coldwater coral habitat mapping applied so far, describingtwo case studies in the Southern Adriatic Sea and discussing caveats and future perspectives.