About usSEABED

usSEABED is the collaborative product of the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Colorado, and other partners and provides integrated data from small and large marine research efforts by many entities—federal and state agencies, local authorities, universities, private and public consortiums. usSEABED includes surficial and subbottom information on grain size, composition, and applied-properties and is held in comma-delimited files, useable in most GIS and RDB programs.

At the core of usSEABED is dbSEABED, a data-mining program based on the application of fuzzy set theory to marine geological and biological data. Fuzzy set theory allows expansion of coverage of the seafloor by the use of word-based data from core logs, sample descriptions, photos, and videos, as well as the more standard numeric data from a laboratory.

The usSEABED data, as seen in GIS presentations below, can be used in a variety of ways, such as:

• assessing the dominance of sand for beach nourishment,
• determining biota locations,
• knowing the grainsize distributions for sea level change analysis,
• knowing the locations of minerals,
• finding the location of mud belts and rocky areas for habitat analysis, and
• linking erodability and coastal hazard analysis.

Sand distribution	Shells and worms distribution	Grain size variations
Phosphorite locations	Mud, sand, and rock distributions	Erodability variations