Bermuda BREAM

BREAM, as part of the Bermuda Biodiversity Project at BZS, has developed the most comprehensive maps of Bermuda's coral reefs and other marine habitats that exist. In this post we will describe how we mapped all of the 35,000 patch reefs in the North Lagoon of Bermuda. Our goal was to create a Geographic Information System (GIS) of all the reefs found around Bermuda. A GIS is a computerized map that also contains information about each object mapped. Computerized maps are better than paper maps because once you put all the information you know into the program, you can then ask it to tell you new information which the program can calculate based on what you told it. Some questions you can ask a computerized mapping programme are listed at the bottom of this post. Before we mapped the location of each reef into a GIS (also called a geo-referenced map database) , we needed a set of images of the entire Bermuda reef platform. The BBP, with assistance from the Dept. of Conservation