Marine

Opening the Doors on Coastal Monitoring

September 12, 2017 by Marine Scotland Communications No Comments | Category Collaborations, Marine Directorate general, Marine Directorate Science, Scottish Coastal Observatory

At-sea remote electronic monitoring (REM) system produces large quantities of data; time-stamped sensor records, video footage, and GPS cruise-track coordinates

3d printed models of phytoplankton, one of the environmental parameters studied at the Stonehaven site. These models were made by Kevin MacKenzie, Microscopy and Histology Core Facility Institute of Medical Sciences, University of Aberdeen using templates generated by Dr. Jeffrey Krause from a grant by the US National Science Foundation (Grant OCE-1155663) to support research and education.

Staff at Marine Scotland are busy preparing for Aberdeenshire Doors Open Day on the 16^th September.

Located in the courtyard of the Tollbooth Museum by Stonehaven harbour between 10am until 4pm, they will be presenting a display about the renowned Scottish Coastal Observatory site located 5km offshore from Stonehaven.

For the last 20 years, environmental factors at sea such as temperature, salinity, nutrients, plankton, ocean acidification have been monitored weekly. The data from this site is much in demand by the scientific community, and others, to help assess the state of coastal ecosystems and to identify impacts of climate change.

There will also be a display about the use of automated image analysis to count and classify fish catches, a task currently undertaken by scientists at Marine Scotland Science. Video footage collected from Remote Electronic Monitoring (REM) systems from  demersal trawlers are being used to train and test this new approach that utilises convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for  fish segmentation and counting. There will also be the opportunity for people to get hands on experience with some fish identification.

Why not come along to find out more about the work being done there?

Further Information

• Aberdeenshire Open Doors Day

Tags: phytoplankton, plankton, research, sampling, SCObs, Stonehaven

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