Habitat Mapping of Cold-Water Corals in the Mediterranean Sea

Habitat mapping is increasingly considered as a reliable and efficient methodology to explore and represent the complexity and extent of benthic communities. Providing a full-coverage spatial perspective of habitat heterogeneity is becoming an essential tool in science-based management of natural resources, specifically regarding vulnerable marine ecosystems such as cold-water corals. Here we present two case studies, where we revisit known cold-water coral areas of the Mediterranean Sea and where we apply original habitat mapping techniques. The areas correspond to the Chella Bank, in the Alborán Sea, and the Santa Maria de Leuca cold-water coral province, in the Ionian Sea. The Chella Bank is one of a series of volcanic banks and knolls located in the western Mediterranean that have been described as geologic features hosting vulnerable marine ecosystems. The cold-water coral province off Santa Maria de Leuca represents one of the largest known occurrences of living reef-forming cold-water coral species (i.e. Lophelia pertusa and Madrepora oculata) in the Mediterranean Sea, where corals grow on the exposed summits and flanks of mound-like structures (up to 300 m wide and 25 m high) associated with mass wasting events. Both cases adopt a holistic and integrated study of the environmental characteristics (geology and oceanography) of the observed benthic habitats and aim to map their extent using supervised automated classifications. Multibeam swath bathymetry, the derived acoustic backscatter, sidescan sonar, video footage gathered with a remotely operated vehicle, photo stills from underwater drop camera, and CTD casts where available, have been used together to identify the geological and oceanographic processes that most likely are responsible for the distribution of the observed cold-water corals and associated benthic communitie

Innovative research methods in health social sciences : an introduction

Innovative, or creative research, methods have become increasingly popular in the last few decades. In this chapter, I will include several salient issues on which chapters in the section on “Innovative Research Methods in Health Social Sciences” can be situated. First, I discuss some ideas about innovative and creative methods. This is followed with the notion of those who practice innovative methods: the innovative researcher. I will then bring readers through a number of innovative and creative methods that researchers have adopted in their research. These include the theoretical lens, arts-based and visual research methods, the body and embodiment research, digital methods, and textual (plus visual) methods of inquiry. As an innovative researcher, our choice of innovative methods primarily depends on the questions we pose; the people who are involved; our moral, ethical, and methodological competence as researchers; and the sociocultural environment of the research. As we are living in the world that continue to change, it is likely that health and social science researchers will continue to experiment with their creative methods in order to ensure the success of their research. I anticipate that in the future, we will see even more creative methods that researchers will bring forth