Welcome aboard! Thank you for visiting this new website dedicated to the field of Side Scan Sonar. What is a Side Scan Sonar? It is a specialized kind of technology that has revolutionized the field of ocean exploration. Its commercial introduction in the mid-1960s helped create a new industry along with many new jobs.

Sonar has been used to find countless shipwrecks. It has been used for many applications related to oil exploration and production. It helped to eliminate the dangerous and costly practice of wire-drag to help clear harbor areas. Its use in military operations such as mine clearance has helped to save lives. It has found many applications in marine construction, dredging, harbor engineering, pipe and cable laying and fisheries.

The original source material for most of the items on this website are in the Martin Klein Collection at the MIT Museum.

• Martin Klein, Father of Side Scan Sonar

This guidebook represents the fully annotated version of a Continuing Education workshop prepared by Kaeser and Litts to train natural resource professionals interested in low-cost, side scan sonar mapping in navigable, aquatic systems. This workshop was first presented at an early 2008 meeting of the Southern Division of the American Fisheries Society in Wheeling, West Virginia, and has since been presented over a dozen times nationwide. Over this time the program has been substantially revised and improved. In the spirit of widespread access and outreach, we have prepared this guidebook to provide the information electronically to anyone interested in the pursuit of sonar habitat mapping.

The program is divided into several sessions that successively build upon one another with the ultimate goal of establishing a foundation for the method we call low-cost sonar habitat mapping. This foundation includes understanding, planning, and executing a sonar mapping survey, geoprocessing the collected sonar data, preparing classified habitat layers by visual interpretation of transformed sonar imagery, evaluating elements of map accuracy, and exploring applications. The live workshop incorporates a virtual demonstration of the geoprocessing approach and tools developed by Litts for creation of the sonar image map layers. The technical details of this process are tackled with the aid of the Sonar Imagery Geoprocessing Workbook and a demonstration data set that accompanies this Guide.

• Adam Kaeser, US Fish & Wildlife Service
• Thom Litts, Georgia Department of Natural Resources