16 Cold-Water Coral Habitat Mapping in the Mediterranean Sea: Methodologies and Perspectives

The marine scientific community developed new habitat mapping procedures that proved to be effective to map seafloor habitats in a holistic manner, thus refining our knowledge of benthic sea life. Several works on this topic focused on cold-water coral habitats at the global scale, with focus on the Atlantic Ocean while, only a few studies applied these methods to the Mediterranean Sea. The prime objective of this chapter is to comment the methodologies used to describe cold-water coral habitats and map their extension; secondly we discuss statistical models to outline the most suitable areas for cold-water coral settlement (habitat suitability models). Furthermore, recent technological developments in habitat mapping procedures provide geophysical data and seafloor images of higher resolution than ever before, while multi-frequency systems supply new hyperspectral images of the seabed.