Recognition and assessment of seafloor vegetation using a single beam echosounder

This study focuses on the potential of using a single beam echosounder as a tool for recognition and assessment of seafloor vegetation. Seafloor vegetation is plant benthos and occupies a large portion of the shallow coastal bottoms. It plays a key role in maintaining the ecological balance by influencing the marine and terrestrial worlds through interactions with its surrounding environment. Understanding of its existence on the seafloor is essential for environmental managers.Due to the important role of seafloor vegetation to the environment, a detailed investigation of acoustic methods that can provide effective recognition and assessment of the seafloor vegetation by using available sonar systems is necessary. One of the frequently adopted approaches to the understanding of ocean environment is through the mapping of the seafloor. Available acoustic techniques vary in kinds and are used for different purposes. Because of the wide scope of available techniques and methods which can be employed in the field, this study has limited itself to sonar techniques of normal incidence configuration relative to seafloors in selected regions and for particular marine habitats. For this study, a single beam echosounder operating at two frequencies was employed. Integrated with the echosounder was a synchronized optical system. The synchronization mechanism between the acoustic and optical systems provided capabilities to have very accurate groundtruth recordings for the acoustic data, which were then utilized as a supervised training data set for the recognition of seafloor vegetation.In this study, results acquired and conclusions made were all based on the comparison against the photographic recordings. The conclusion drawn from this investigation is only as accurate as within the selected habitat types and within very shallow water regions.In order to complete this study, detailed studies of literature and deliberately designed field experiments were carried out. Acoustic data classified with the help of the synchronized optical system were investigated by several methods. Conventional methods such as statistics and multivariate analyses were examined. Conventional methods for the recognition of the collected data gave some useful results but were found to have limited capabilities. When seeking for more robust methods, an alternative approach, Genetic Programming (GP), was tested on the same data set for comparison. Ultimately, the investigation aims to understand potential methods which can be effective in differentiating the acoustic backscatter signals of the habitats observed and subsequently distinguishing between the habitats involved in this study

Launching the Grand Challenges for Ocean Conservation

The ten most pressing Grand Challenges in Oceans Conservation were identified at the Oceans Big Think and described in a detailed working document:A Blue Revolution for Oceans: Reengineering Aquaculture for SustainabilityEnding and Recovering from Marine DebrisTransparency and Traceability from Sea to Shore:  Ending OverfishingProtecting Critical Ocean Habitats: New Tools for Marine ProtectionEngineering Ecological Resilience in Near Shore and Coastal AreasReducing the Ecological Footprint of Fishing through Smarter GearArresting the Alien Invasion: Combating Invasive SpeciesCombatting the Effects of Ocean AcidificationEnding Marine Wildlife TraffickingReviving Dead Zones: Combating Ocean Deoxygenation and Nutrient Runof

Constructing living buildings: a review of relevant technologies for a novel application of biohybrid robotics

Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to the expansion and exploitation of biological behaviours for application to automated tasks. Here, we identify the construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy in the last decades have comprised a major portion of economic production, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Integrating biological organisms into automated construction tasks and permanent building components therefore has high potential for impact. Live materials can provide several advantages over standard synthetic construction materials, including self-repair of damage, increase rather than degradation of structural performance over time, resilience to corrosive environments, support of biodiversity, and mitigation of urban heat islands. Here, we review relevant technologies, which are currently disparate. They span robotics, self-organizing systems, artificial life, construction automation, structural engineering, architecture, bioengineering, biomaterials, and molecular and cellular biology. In these disciplines, developments relevant to biohybrid construction and living buildings are in the early stages, and typically are not exchanged between disciplines. We, therefore, consider this review useful to the future development of biohybrid engineering for this highly interdisciplinary application.publishe

Deep learning for the early detection of harmful algal blooms and improving water quality monitoring

Climate change will affect how water sources are managed and monitored. The frequency of algal blooms will increase with climate change as it presents favourable conditions for the reproduction of phytoplankton. During monitoring, possible sensory failures in monitoring systems result in partially filled data which may affect critical systems. Therefore, imputation becomes necessary to decrease error and increase data quality. This work investigates two issues in water quality data analysis: improving data quality and anomaly detection. It consists of three main topics: data imputation, early algal bloom detection using in-situ data and early algal bloom detection using multiple modalities.The data imputation problem is addressed by experimenting with various methods with a water quality dataset that includes four locations around the North Sea and the Irish Sea with different characteristics and high miss rates, testing model generalisability. A novel neural network architecture with self-attention is proposed in which imputation is done in a single pass, reducing execution time. The self-attention components increase the interpretability of the imputation process at each stage of the network, providing knowledge to domain experts.After data curation, algal activity is predicted using transformer networks, between 1 to 7 days ahead, and the importance of the input with regard to the output of the prediction model is explained using SHAP, aiming to explain model behaviour to domain experts which is overlooked in previous approaches. The prediction model improves bloom detection performance by 5% on average and the explanation summarizes the complex structure of the model to input-output relationships. Performance improvements on the initial unimodal bloom detection model are made by incorporating multiple modalities into the detection process which were only used for validation purposes previously. The problem of missing data is also tackled by using coordinated representations, replacing low quality in-situ data with satellite data and vice versa, instead of imputation which may result in biased results

A Review of Harmful Algal Bloom Prediction Models for Lakes and Reservoirs

Anthropogenic activity has led to eutrophication in water bodies across the world. This eutrophication promotes blooms, cyanobacteria being among the most notorious bloom organisms. Cyanobacterial blooms (more commonly referred to as harmful algal blooms (HABs)) can devastate an ecosystem. Cyanobacteria are resilient microorganisms that have adapted to survive under a variety of conditions, often outcompeting other phytoplankton. Some species of cyanobacteria produce toxins that ward off predators. These toxins can negatively affect the health of the aquatic life, but also can impact animals and humans that drink or come in contact with these noxious waters. Although cyanotoxin’s effects on humans are not as well researched as the growth, behavior, and ecological niche of cyanobacteria, their health impacts are of large concern. It is important that research to mitigate and understand cyanobacterial blooms and cyanotoxin production continues. This project supports continued research by addressing an approach to collect and summarize published articles that focus on techniques and models to predict cyanobacterial blooms with the goal of understanding what research has been done to promote future work. The following report summarizes 34 articles from 2003 to 2020 that each describe a mechanistic or data driven model developed to predict the occurrence of cyanobacterial blooms or the presence of cyanotoxins in lakes or reservoirs with similar climates to Utah. These articles showed a shift from more mechanistic approaches to more data driven approaches with time. This resulted in a more individualistic approach to modeling, meaning that models are often produced for a single lake or reservoir and are not easily comparable to other models for different systems

A review of recent machine learning advances for forecasting harmful Algal Blooms and shellfish contamination

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are among the most severe ecological marine problems worldwide. Under favorable climate and oceanographic conditions, toxin-producing microalgae species may proliferate, reach increasingly high cell concentrations in seawater, accumulate in shellfish, and threaten the health of seafood consumers. There is an urgent need for the development of effective tools to help shellfish farmers to cope and anticipate HAB events and shellfish contamination, which frequently leads to significant negative economic impacts. Statistical and machine learning forecasting tools have been developed in an attempt to better inform the shellfish industry to limit damages, improve mitigation measures and reduce production losses. This study presents a synoptic review covering the trends in machine learning methods for predicting HABs and shellfish biotoxin contamination, with a particular focus on autoregressive models, support vector machines, random forest, probabilistic graphical models, and artificial neural networks (ANN). Most efforts have been attempted to forecast HABs based on models of increased complexity over the years, coupled with increased multi-source data availability, with ANN architectures in the forefront to model these events. The purpose of this review is to help defining machine learning-based strategies to support shellfish industry to manage their harvesting/production, and decision making by governmental agencies with environmental responsibilities.CEECINST/00102/2018/ UIDB/04516/2020/ UIDB/00297/2020/ UIDB/50021/2020/ UID/Multi/04326/2020info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Estimating the concentration of physico chemical parameters in hydroelectric power plant reservoir

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) defines the amazon region and adjacent areas, such as the Pantanal, as world heritage territories, since they possess unique flora and fauna and great biodiversity. Unfortunately, these regions have increasingly been suffering from anthropogenic impacts. One of the main anthropogenic impacts in the last decades has been the construction of hydroelectric power plants. As a result, dramatic altering of these ecosystems has been observed, including changes in water levels, decreased oxygenation and loss of downstream organic matter, with consequent intense land use and population influxes after the filling and operation of these reservoirs. This, in turn, leads to extreme loss of biodiversity in these areas, due to the large-scale deforestation. The fishing industry in place before construction of dams and reservoirs, for example, has become much more intense, attracting large populations in search of work, employment and income. Environmental monitoring is fundamental for reservoir management, and several studies around the world have been performed in order to evaluate the water quality of these ecosystems. The Brazilian Amazon, in particular, goes through well defined annual hydrological cycles, which are very importante since their study aids in monitoring anthropogenic environmental impacts and can lead to policy and decision making with regard to environmental management of this area. The water quality of amazon reservoirs is greatly influenced by this defined hydrological cycle, which, in turn, causes variations of microbiological, physical and chemical characteristics. Eutrophication, one of the main processes leading to water deterioration in lentic environments, is mostly caused by anthropogenic activities, such as the releases of industrial and domestic effluents into water bodies. Physico-chemical water parameters typically related to eutrophication are, among others, chlorophyll-a levels, transparency and total suspended solids, which can, thus, be used to assess the eutrophic state of water bodies. Usually, these parameters must be investigated by going out to the field and manually measuring water transparency with the use of a Secchi disk, and taking water samples to the laboratory in order to obtain chlorophyll-a and total suspended solid concentrations. These processes are time- consuming and require trained personnel. However, we have proposed other techniques to environmental monitoring studies which do not require fieldwork, such as remote sensing and computational intelligence. Simulations in different reservoirs were performed to determine a relationship between these physico-chemical parameters and the spectral response. Based on the in situ measurements, empirical models were established to relate the reflectance of the reservoir measured by the satellites. The images were calibrated and corrected atmospherically. Statistical analysis using error estimation was used to evaluate the most accurate methodology. The Neural Networks were trained by hydrological cycle, and were useful to estimate the physicalchemical parameters of the water from the reflectance of visible bands and NIR of satellite images, with better results for the period with few clouds in the regions analyzed. The present study shows the application of wavelet neural network to estimate water quality parameters using concentration of the water samples collected in the Amazon reservoir and Cefni reservoir, UK. Sattelite imagens from Landsats and Sentinel-2 were used to train the ANN by hydrological cycle. The trained ANNs demonstrated good results between observed and estimated after Atmospheric corrections in satellites images. The ANNs showed in the results are useful to estimate these concentrations using remote sensing and wavelet transform for image processing. Therefore, the techniques proposed and applied in the present study are noteworthy since they can aid in evaluating important physico-chemical parameters, which, in turn, allows for identification of possible anthropogenic impacts, being relevant in environmental management and policy decision-making processes. The tests results showed that the predicted values have good accurate. Improving efficiency to monitor water quality parameters and confirm the reliability and accuracy of the approaches proposed for monitoring water reservoirs. This thesis contributes to the evaluation of the accuracy of different methods in the estimation of physical-chemical parameters, from satellite images and artificial neural networks. For future work, the accuracy of the results can be improved by adding more satellite images and testing new neural networks with applications in new water reservoirs

STEM Undergraduate Research Symposium 2017 Full Program

Full program of the 2017 LSSF STEM Undergraduate Research Conference