Evaluating Effectiveness of Side Scan Sonar in Assessing Littoral Habitat Diversity in Arizona Reservoirs

Fish habitat is a crucial component in our lake and reservoir systems and few cost effective tools have been used in Arizona to evaluate reservoir habitat. Side scan sonar is a new tool that has recently been used in freshwater systems to evaluate fish habitat.  Multiple states have been using side scan sonar successfully to evaluate reservoir fish habitat. The objective of the study was to determine if low-cost side scan sonar is an effective tool at classifying Arizona shoreline substrate. Roosevelt Lake was used as the study site and shoreline sonar surveys were conducted with a Humminbird ONIX 10SICI unit. Substrate was classified into three substrate classes; fine (F), rough (R), and vegetation (V). Snorkel surveys were used to evaluate the sonar substrate classification system by creating a referenced data set. Thematic accuracy of the Roosevelt Lake shoreline substrate map was evaluated using a standard error matrix. The standard error matrix resulted in an overall accuracy of 70% while normalized accuracy was 72% using Margfit analysis. The results of our study confirmed low-cost side scan sonar as an effective tool to evaluate shoreline substrate in reservoir systems.