A New Perspective on Marine Geomorphological Mapping through Advanced Data Visualization in the southern Baltic Sea area (preliminary results)

Technological development allows new information to be derived from existing data. This saves financial resources while developing and detailing geological products such as maps. Using the data obtained for the geological map of the seabed and applying a new approach to data classification and visualisation, an information layer was created that represents a new approach to geomorphological mapping of the seabed of Poland (Southern Baltic Sea).

Data from extensive studies carried out by the Polish Geological Institute - NRI were used to produce this layer. The bathymetric background was obtained from the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) project. Vocabularies and manuals developed by the EMODnet project team were also used to classify and visualise the data.

In the first phase of the work, bathymetric information was used. This was used to create a morphometric model using the Benthic Terrain Modeler (BTM) 3.0 for ArcGIS tool to determine the shapes present on the seafloor. The next step was to combine the resulting morphometric model with geological and genetic information from geological studies. The third step was to classify the extracted bathymetric-geological forms according to the EMODnet vocabularies and manuals. The fourth step was to generalise and unify the data for dissemination through a dedicated EMODnet Map Viewer.