An important aspect of marine research is to quantify the areal coverage of benthic communities. Benthic cover area is the basis of studies on biodiversity, characterization of communities, evaluation of changes over spatial and temporal scales, and benthic ecosystem health.
As a result of a multidisciplinary effort with contributions from engineers in computer vision and marine ecologists, we developed the free software Seascape. Seascape obtains semi-automatically segmented images (homogenous regions) from underwater photographs of benthic communities and computes for each individual patch its cover area and perimeter. For more information, please visit the web page www.seascapesoft.org.