Visual Soundings. Project Final Report to the Richard Lounsbery Foundation

The idea for the Visual Soundings project was developed at the Marine Geological and Biological Habitat Mapping conference in May 2012 on the Orcas Islands USA. The aim of the project was to contribute new knowledge of the seafloor through a non-traditional research output that equally discussed concepts of how we interpret the seafloor and to express new ways of communicating ideas about the unknown and unseen environment of the ocean. To do this we wanted to investigate a high impact method to bring acoustic seafloor images to the public- where the quality and composition of the images could be valued and appreciated as “art”. The initial intention of the project was to solicit up to one hundred images from the seafloor mapping community and propose the images to a publisher with a concept design to print a large format hard cover color book. Unfortunately, after three years it was agreed that the aim of this project was not going to be achieved due to the lack of images and a new idea of publishing the received images onto a website- visualsoundings.org was developed. This report details the aims and objectives of the project, the reporting schedule and the timeline for the success of the project.