MAPPING MATTERS

VOL. 5 | ISSUE 3 | July 2025

USF undergraduate and Florida High Tech Corridor intern Grace Angeli created a stop-motion animation video highlighting their work with oceanic gliders.

FL High Tech Corridor Internship Wrap-Up

Students get hands on with the Florida High Tech Corridor

The College of Marine Science hosted five undergraduate interns who gained valuable research experience over the course of the semester.

Explore their work and check out the science communication products they developed during their internships:

A cool product to emerge from the Florida High Tech Corridor collaboration is an image recognition database that automatically classifies seagrass structure in video footage from autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs), designed to be directly compared with acoustic sonar signals. This gives researchers a faster way to process and analyze underwater video, opening up new possibilities for AI-assisted habitat mapping.

Screenshot of the in-development seagrass image recognition tool. Built with Python and server-side storage, it uses ASV video to train models for scalable, real-time habitat classification.

Increasing Capabilities with USV EMMET

COMIT and the Florida Flood Hub for Applied Research and Innovation have acquired a new uncrewed surface vessel (USV) from Maritime Robotics –The Otter– now officially named EMMET (Enhanced Mobile Mapping with Emerging Technologies).

Watch the video above to catch a glimpse of EMMET’s delivery and unboxing, and check out the clip below to see the team in action as they explore the vessel’s systems and celebrate EMMET’s first splash!

Geodetic Spar Buoy – SUBGEO-1 – is Live

Researcher, Jay Law, atop SUBGEO-1 spar buoy, 35-ft above the water.

We’re excited to share that near real-time data from the SUBGEO-1 spar buoy is now available on the USF College of Marine Science’s Coastal Ocean Monitoring and Prediction System (COMPS) site.

The buoy is actively collecting atmospheric data –air temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind– as well as oceanographic data including water temperature, pressure, sea level, and wave height/period. Data is recorded every 30 minutes and updated hourly.

The team continues to refine system performance and troubleshoot signal interference challenges – stay tuned for progress in the next issue.

Snapshot from the COMPS webpage displaying real-time readings from the SUBGEO-01 spar buoy.

GEOHAB Conference 2025

Group photo at GEOHAB 2025 in Key West, Florida.

(Photo courtesy of Vincent Lecours)

Members of the USF College of Marine Science and COMIT team had a productive week (May 12-16) at the 2025 GeoHab Conference in Key West, which brought together international researchers and experts in marine geological and biological science, mapping and technology.

Lightning talks included:

Hidden Landscape: Unveiling Seafloor Habitats and Morphology of East Antarctica’s Sabrina Coast | Margaret Hanley, Steve A. Murawski, Amelia A. Shevenell, Stephan O'Brien, Matthew Hommeyer, Jacob Stock
Community Scale Seagrass Habitat Mapping Using Multibeam Sonar Water Column Data in Tampa Bay | Bea Combs-Hintze, Jaden Crute, Carolina Peraltova, Peter Urban, Stephan O'Brien, Alex Silverman, Chad Lembke, Matthew Hommeyer, Marie Meranda, Ryan Brushwood, David Naar, Steve Murawski
Natural Reference Area for Bathymetry and Backscatter Quality Control and Calibration: Establishment Protocols, Benefits and Feasibility | Marc Roche, Stephan O'Brien, Ridha Fezzani, Samuel Deleu, Xavier Lurton, Alexandre C.G. Schimel, Fabio Sachetti and Felix Butschek

Margaret Hanley (USF College of Marine Science and COMIT master's student) delivers a lightning talk to GEOHAB attendees.

(Photo courtesy of Vincent Lecours)

Posters included:

Identifying Essential Fish Habitat and Providing Sampling Design Guidance to Inform Offshore Energy Development | Alex Ilich, Erik E. Ebert, Michael A. Bollinger, Ben Churchwell, Klaus B. Huebert, Steven A. Murawski, Matthew Poti, Karina Urquhart, Arliss J. Winship, J. Christopher Taylor
Protocol for the Establishment of a Backscatter Reference Area (Draft V1) | Alexandre C. G. Schimel, Marc Roche, Ridha Fezzani, Stephan O'Brien, Xavier Lurton, Alex Ilich
Developing Sites in West Florida Nearshore Region to Calibrate Multibeam Backscatter | Stephan O'Brien, Matthew Hommeyer, Chad Lembke, Alex Silverman, Jacob Stock, David Naar, Sherryl Gilbert, Roxann Vistocci, Steven Murawski

Alex Ilich (bottom left) and Matt Hommeyer (top right) discuss their research with attendees during the GEOHAB 2025 poster session, hosted on the scenic grounds of the historic Hemingway House.

A special congratulations to Alexander Ilich and NOAA’s Klaus Huebert for taking first place in the inaugural GeoHab Machine Learning Working Group competition with their combined modeling approach to predict mean grain size using bathymetric and oceanographic data. 🏆

Alex Ilich (USF College of Marine Science PhD candidate and COMIT student) receives first place award from Benjamin Misiuk.

(Photo courtesy of GEOHAB 2025)

CSBWG 16

Kristie Erickson (COMIT/FIO) joins fellow participants aboard a research vessel in Wellington, New Zealand, as part of the IHO Crowdsourced Bathymetry Working Group (CBWG) meeting.

COMIT continues to advance its Crowd the Bay program, a regional crowdsourced bathymetry (CSB) initiative that enables volunteer vessels to collect and share depth measurements using standard navigation instruments during routine operations.

Now in Phase III: Regional Scale Demonstration, COMIT is refining protocols and deepening engagement with its network of contributors to generate data products valuable to both participants and end-users. The program has now contributed 4.85 million depth soundings to the International Hydrographic Organization’s (IHO) Data Center for Digital Bathymetry (DCDB).

Kristin Erickson represented the team at the IHO CSBWG 16 meeting in Wellington, New Zealand (March 24-28). The event brought together participants from over 20 countries to share tools, techniques, and strategies for developing and supporting CSB programs worldwide.

Crowdsourced bathymetry efforts like these compliment traditional surveys and play a vital role in improving navigation safety, coastal flood forecasting, habitat mapping, and disaster response. Kristin Erickson and Sophia Chernoch (USF CMS and COMIT master's student) have developed a step-by-step CSB "Playbook" that covers nearly everything needed to build, operate, and grow a successful crowdsourced bathymetry program. We look forward to sharing this in its final form!

CSBWG 16 participants in front of picturesque, Evans Bay, New Zealand.

Kudos

Two COMIT-authored papers have been accepted into the Marine Technology Society Journal's (MTSJ) upcoming special issue.

Keep an eye out for:

Bathymetric Mapping in the Coastal Zone: Approaches, Challenges, and Opportunities

Steven A. Murawski, Sherryl Gilbert, Matthew Hommeyer, Yonggang Liu, Chad Lembke, Sarah Grasty, David English, Chuanmin Hu, Tim Dixon, and Taha Sadeghi Chorsi

and

Partnering with the “Crowd”: Development of a Community Bathymetry Program in Tampa Bay, Florida, USA

Sherryl Gilbert, Steven A. Murawski, Mark E. Luther, Kristin Erickson, Alex Silverman, Matthew Hommeyer, Roxann Vistocci, Sophie Chernoch

Hot off the press (published in AGU's JGR Atmospheres on June 26):

🔗Rapid Intensification of Hurricane Ian (2022) in High Shear

Alexander K. Nickerson, Jun. A. Zhang, Robert H. Weisberg, Yonggang Liu

Published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering (Dec. 18, 2024):

🔗Analyzing Archive Transit Multibeam Data for Nodule Occurrences

Mark E. Musset. David F. Naar, David W. Caress, Tracey A. Conrad, Alastair G. C. Graham, Max Kaufmann, Marcia Maia

Check out Mark Mussett et al.'s paper from the Offshore Technology Conference (May 5-8, 2025) :

🔗Polymetallic Nodule Detection Using Hull-Mounted 30 Kilohertz Multibeam Data Analysis

Snippets

Read Here

Mapping Florida’s Seafloor for Resilience

The Florida Seafloor Mapping Initiative (FSMI) is producing high-resolution bathymetric data to help protect the state’s vulnerable coastlines from erosion and intensifying storms.

Learn more in this Sea Technology magazine article by Cheryl Hapke (COMIT/Fugro) and Richard Goosen (Fugro)

Cheryl Hapke attended the Gulf of America Alliance All Hands Meeting in Biloxi, MS

(May 5-8)—presenting on the Florida Coastal Mapping Program (FCMap).

Listen to the USF Global and National Security Institute's At the Boundary podcast episode: Can Deep Sea Mining Meet the World’s Critical Mineral Demand?—featuring Dr. Mark Luther (COMIT co-PI).

PhD student Maliha Masfiqua Malek is gathering valuable data for her dissertation from a USF CMS research cruise funded by the Florida RESTORE Act Centers of Excellence Program, in support of the Spawning Habitat and Early-Life Linkages (SHELF) research program, coordinated by Professor Chris Stallings. Dr. Stallings has provided the opportunity to collect EK60 sonar data across the West Florida Shelf to further identify potential paleoshorelines in an effort to investigate the rate of the most recent sea-level rise since the Last Glacial Maximum (~19,000 years ago). This work builds on COMIT alumn Catalina Rubiano’s master’s research, which focused primarily on mapping and interpreting known paleoshorelines in the region.

Maliha catches a sunset on the latest SHELF research cruise (June 13-24).

Drs. Yonggang Liu (pictured above, far right) and Robert Weisberg (front, left) were invited to give presentations on the topics of storm surge and coastal inundation forecasts and hurricane rapid intensification at the Symposium on Tropical Cyclone Risk in a Changing Climate in Clearwater, FL (May 31 – June 4).

Liu, Y., Xu, H., Qiao, K., John, S., San, S.-C., Weisberg, R. H., Chen J., Zheng, L., Gilbert, S., Murawski, S. A., Mitchum, G. T., Frazer, T. K. (2025), Storm Surge and Coastal Inundation Nowcasts/Forecasts During Hurricanes Helene and Milton

Weisberg, R.H., Liu, Y., Nickerson, A.K., Zhang, J.A., Sorinas, L., Law, J.A. (2025), Rapid Intensification of Hurricane Ian: High Shear in the Atmosphere but Anomalously Warm Subsurface Water on the Wide Continental Shelf

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