Research Areas > Contaminants > Sediment Quality Assessment > Benthic Assessment Methods > Sediment Profile Imaging

Project: Sediment Profile Imaging

Background and Objectives

Benthic infauna are used extensively as indicators of sediment quality. However, traditional benthic assessments are time-consuming, partly because they involve manually identifying and counting collected organisms, which is a labor intensive process. In addition, there is a shortage of trained taxonomists to identify and count benthic organisms, and demand is increasing because of new regulatory programs that assess sediments (e.g., the State of California’s Sediment Quality Objectives).

The goal of this project is to investigate an alternate method of measuring benthic community condition: sediment profile imagery (SPI). The SPI is a field-deployed digital camera that captures cross-sectional images of soft-bottom environments. These images reveal important aspects of benthic morphology such as the redox potential discontinuity and burrows and tubes of infaunal organisms, which are used to calculate SPI indices.

Status

This project was initiated in 2008, with anticipated completion in 2012.

Methods

This study involves side-by-side comparisons between SPI and traditional benthic assessments at 74 sites in Los Angeles Harbor, Long Beach Harbor, and San Diego Bay, in coordination with the Bight’08 Regional Marine Monitoring Program. To assess the ability of SPI to track known gradients of impact, images were also collected at 39 sites near the mouth of Chollas Creek, an urban watershed in San Diego Bay that is the subject of regulatory action. The images will be processed by SCCWRP’s partners at the US Environmental Protection Agency while infaunal samples are identified by SCCWRP’s Bight’08 partners. Researchers will then evaluate the performance of SPI for assessing benthic condition relative to traditional benthic indices.

Partners

This project is being conducted in collaboration with the US Environmental Protection Agency Office of Research and Development, and participants in the Bight’08 Coastal Ecology study.

Presentation

Can Sediment Profile Imaging (SPI) Enhance Traditional Benthic Assessments? - January 2009 presentation to SCCWRP member agencies describing the use of sediment profile imagery.