The GeoHab Backscatter Working Group: definition of guidelines and recommendations for seafloor backscatter measurements by hydrographic multibeam echosounders

The Marine Geological and Biological Habitat Mapping (GeoHab) group gathers a community of geoscientists and biologists around the topic of marine habitat mapping, with a strong technological component. During its 2013 annual meeting, a workshop dedicated to multibeam seafloor backscatter concluded the need for better coherence and common agreement on acquisition, processing and interpretation of data. Subsequently, the GeoHab Backscatter Working Group (BSWG) was created, with the mandate of proposing best practices for the acquisition and processing of seafloor backscatter, and providing recommendations for further development of backscatter acquisition systems and processing software. The group brings together researchers, end-users, sonar manufacturers and software developers, with the goal of producing realistic guidelines and providing feedback on how hardware and software tools can be improved. Co-written by specialists of the various fields involved, the guide presented at the GeoHab meeting in May 2015 covers six main topics: backscatter fundamentals user needs seafloor backscatter measurements acquisition best practices backscatter processing Designed to reach a wide audience of scientists, engineers, operators and stakeholders all using sonar backscatter for seafloor-mapping applications, the BSWG report proposes fundamentals of the topic, a state-of-the art of techniques, and a number of recommendations for future systems and processing.