Benjamin Misiuk , Craig J. Brown

What is benthic habitat mapping, how is it accomplished, and how has that changed over time? We query the published literature to answer these questions and synthesize the results quantitatively to provide a comprehensive review of the field over the past three decades. Categories of benthic habitat maps are differentiated unambiguously by the response variable (i.e., the subject being mapped) rather than the approaches used to produce the map. Additional terminology in the literature is clarified and defined based on provenance, statistical criteria, and common usage. Mapping approaches, models, data sets, technologies, and a range of other attributes are reviewed based on their application, and we document changes to the ways that these components have been integrated to map benthic habitats over time. We found that the use of acoustic remote sensing has been surpassed by optical methods for obtaining benthic environmental data. Although a wide variety of approaches are employed to ground truth habitat maps, underwater imagery has become the most common validation tool – surpassing physical sampling. The use of empirical machine learning models to process these data has increased dramatically over the past 10 years, and has superseded expert manual interpretation. We discuss how map products derived from these data and approaches are used to address ecological questions in the emerging field of seascape ecology, and how remote sensing technologies and field survey logistics pose different challenges to this research field across benthic ecosystems from intertidal and shallow sublittoral regions to the deep ocean. Outstanding challenges are identified and discussed in context with the trajectory of the field.