topography

ABSTRACT: The widespread loss of stony reef-building coral populations has been compounded by the low settlement and survival of coral juveniles. To rebuild coral communities, restoration practitioners have developed workflows to settle vulnerable coral larvae in the laboratory and outplant settled juveniles back to natural and artificial reefs. These workflows often make use of natural biochemical settlement cues, which are presented to swimming larvae to induce settlement. This paper establishes the potential for inorganic cues to complement these known biochemical effects. Settlement substrates were fabricated from calcium carbonate, a material present naturally on reefs, and modified with additives including sands, glasses, and alkaline earth carbonates. Experiments with larvae of two Caribbean coral species revealed additive-specific settlement preferences that were independent of bulk surface properties such as mean roughness and wettability. Instead, analyses of the substrates suggest that settling coral larvae can detect localized topographical features more than an order of magnitude smaller than their body width and can sense and positively respond to soluble inorganic minerals such as silica (SiO2) and strontianite (SrCO3). These findings open a new area of research in coral reef restoration, in which composite substrates can be designed with a combination of natural organic and inorganic additives to increase larval settlement and perhaps also improve post-settlement growth, mineralization, and defense.

Scans of paper topographical maps of all of Bonaire.

6 paper maps have been stitched together and projected for use in GIS.

Year of publication is unknown.

In 1911, J. Smeulders & Co. at The Hague published the “Topographic map of Curaçao” in 18 pages, measuring 46 x 46 cm; nowadays known as the “Werbata maps”. These beautiful and very detailed maps in color have never been improved, with regard to accuracy, by later topographic maps of the island, made with the help of aerial survey. An example of how detailed Werbata worked appears, among other things, from the manner in which he indicated buildings. By means of color and manner of drawing, he made a distinction between ‘stone buildings’, ‘wooden buildings’ and ‘clay cottages’. For enclosures or boundaries, he made a distinction between ‘stone walls’, wooden fences, stone hedges (slave walls) or ‘live hedgerows’. The maps are therefore extremely informative for historical research.

What makes the Werbata maps also important is the fact that they were drawn just before the oil industry came to Curaçao and drastically changed the picture around Schottegat with its many country estates and plantations. Except for the whole island, Werbata also made a map of the city, on which the city districts of Punda, Pietermaai, Scharloo and Otrobanda are recorded. It appeared in 1912 to a scale of 1: 5,000 in 2 pages.

In that same year, the topographic map of Aruba appeared to a scale of 1 : 20,000 in 8 pages; in October 1915, that of the Dutch part of St. Maarten in 2 pages and that of St. Eustatius in 1 page. Finally, in 1916, the topographic map of Bonaire appeared in 10 pages. Unfortunately, no map was made of the island of Saba.

All the Werbata maps were put on 2 CD Roms by Harrie Verstappen. They can be obtained at the Maritime Museum, Mensing’s Caminada and Harrie Verstappen. Selling point at: The Werbata Maps.

Please contact the DCBD administratorfor more information and availability.

SabaGIS contains many GIS related data products for Saba, such as :

• Scanned topophical map
• High resolution aerial photograph
• Topography layers
• Digital Elevation Model (incl, hillshade, aspect, slope, etc.)
• Landsat 7 sababank image (Jan 2003)
• etc

Multiple topographical map layers:

• Roads (source: CARMABI.)
• Contours (source: CARMABI)
• Cliffs (source: CARMABI)
• Inland island (source: CARMABI)
• Inland waterbodies(source: CARMABI)
• Riverbeds (source: derived from 30m digital elevation model (ASTER DEM)

OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.

Multiple topographical map layers:

• Roads (source: Imms, E.)
• Buildings (source: DCNA)
• Fences (source: Puijk, A., 2015)
• Contours (source: CARMABI)
• Dive sites (source: Imms, E.)
• Hiking trails (source: STENAPA)
• Streams (source: derived from 30m digital elevation model (ASTER DEM)

1. There has been ongoing flattening of Caribbean coral reefs with the loss of habitat having severe implications for these systems. Complexity and its structural components are important to fish species richness and community composition, but little is known about its role for other taxa or species-specific responses. 2. This study reveals the importance of reef habitat complexity and structural components to different taxa of macrofauna, total species richness, and individual coral and fish species in the Caribbean. 3. Species presence and richness of different taxa were visually quantified in one hundred 25-m2 plots in three marine reserves in the Caribbean. Sampling was evenly distributed across five levels of visually estimated reef complexity, with five structural components also recorded: the number of corals, number of large corals, slope angle, maximum sponge and maximum octocoral height. Taking advantage of natural heterogeneity in structural complexity within a particular coral reef habitat (Orbicella reefs) and discrete environmental envelope, thus minimizing other sources of variability, the relative importance of reef complexity and structural components was quantified for different taxa and individual fish and coral species on Caribbean coral reefs using boosted regression trees (BRTs). 4. Boosted regression tree models performed very well when explaining variability in total (823%), coral (806%) and fish species richness (773%), for which the greatest declines in richness occurred below intermediate reef complexity levels. Complexity accounted for very little of the variability in octocorals, sponges, arthropods, annelids or anemones. BRTs revealed species-specific variability and importance for reef complexity and structural components. Coral and fish species occupancy generally declined at low complexity levels, with the exception of two coral species (Pseudodiploria strigosa and Porites divaricata) and four fish species (Halichoeres bivittatus, H. maculipinna, Malacoctenus triangulatus and Stegastes partitus) more common at lower reef complexity levels. A significant interaction between country and reef complexity revealed a non-additive decline in species richness in areas of low complexity and the reserve in Puerto Rico. 5. Flattening of Caribbean coral reefs will result in substantial species losses, with few winners. Individual structural components have considerable value to different species, and their loss may have profound impacts on population responses of coral and fish due to identity effects of key species, which underpin population richness and resilience and may affect essential ecosystem processes and services.