Evaluation and Analysis of Benthic Data for Jamaica Bay

Grothues, Thomas; Dobarro, Joseph; Spahn, Andrea

From the NPS we obtained an electronic copy of the Draft Report, dated December 2011. The report consists of 59 pages, (Figure and table pages numbered separately). A “DRAFT” watermark on all text pages mark it as such. The report is relatively complete in its treatment of the subject matter including analysis, summary, and interpretation, but is conspicuously lacking a promised section “Acoustic Classification and Sediment Distribution Patterns” and its supporting figure (designated by a placeholder Figure 20 in that report). Since the available data set included information from surveys in 2000, 2003, and 2008, this data was reviewed as supplemental material. There is no single central documentation of the data file organization and content (i.e. no single metadata document). Figure 1 below shows the file structure and Table 1 annotates it based on our inspection of this material, but cannot be comprehensive without input by the report author. However, individual inspected files seem to be well organized in terms of headers and annotation and contain common reference indicators to other files so that a relational database structure can be constructed to allow queries. The available data files also included the raw side scan sonar backscatter files (*.xtf) for only a single short survey segment, thus we cannot execute the missing sediment classification from acoustic backscatter data. It was possible, however, to partially describe the distribution of simple sediment classes from grab samples and relate these to such variables as depth and bedform features from the side scan mosaic. This information will only partially describe the bedform of the bay because the sediment sampling was restricted to certain areas of the total acoustically surveyed areas. This characterization will become important in providing context for the interpretation of our own planned sampling effort in Jamaica Bay in 2015. A summary of the Flood 2011 report follows and identifies objectives in context of sampling to be performed by Rutgers.