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North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium 2021 Annual Report Card
Full text linkThe North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) remains one of the most endangered large whales in the world. Over the past two decades, there has been increasing interest in addressing the problems hampering the recovery of North Atlantic right whales by using innovative research techniques, new technologies, analyses of existing databases, and enhanced conservation and education strategies. This increased interest demanded better coordination and collaboration among all stakeholders to ensure that there was improved access to data, research efforts were not duplicative, and that findings were shared with all interested parties. The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, initially formed in 1986 by five research institutions to share data among themselves, was expanded in 1997 to address these greater needs. Currently, the Consortium membership is comprised of representatives from more than 100 entities including: research, academic, and conservation organizations; shipping and fishing industries; whale watching companies; technical experts; United States (U.S.) and Canadian Government agencies; and state authorities. North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium members agreed in 2004 that an annual “report card” on the status of right whales would be useful. This report card includes updates on the status of the cataloged population, mortalities and injury events, and a summary of management and research efforts that have occurred over the previous 12 months. The Board’s goal is to make public a summary of current research and management activities, as well as provide detailed recommendations for future activities. The Board views this report as a valuable asset in assessing the effects of research and management over time.Island Foundation; Conference Fee
North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium 2007 Annual Report Card
Full text linkThe North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) remains one of the most endangered large whales in the world. Over the past two decades, there has been increasing interest in addressing the problems hampering the recovery of North Atlantic right whales by using innovative research techniques, new technologies, analyses of existing databases, and enhanced conservation and education strategies. This increased interest demanded better coordination and collaboration among all stakeholders to ensure that there was improved access to data, research efforts were not duplicative, and that findings were shared with all interested parties. The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, initially formed in 1986 by five research institutions to share data among themselves, was expanded in 1997 to address these greater needs. Currently, the Consortium membership is comprised of representatives from more than 100 entities including: research, academic, and conservation organizations; shipping and fishing industries; whale watching companies; technical experts; United States (U.S.) and Canadian Government agencies; and state authorities. North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium members agreed in 2004 that an annual “report card” on the status of right whales would be useful. This report card includes updates on the status of the cataloged population, mortalities and injury events, and a summary of management and research efforts that have occurred over the previous 12 months. The Board’s goal is to make public a summary of current research and management activities, as well as provide detailed recommendations for future activities. The Board views this report as a valuable asset in assessing the effects of research and management over time.Island Foundation; Conference Fee
Biogeochemistry, metabolomics, and metagenomics of Florida's Coral Reef from sampling conducted over 15 days in June 2019
Full text linkDataset: Reef biogeochemistry, metabolomics, and metagenomicsThis comparative 'omics dataset was collected over 15 days in June 2019 along Florida's Coral Reef. We assessed 85 reefs for the prevalence of stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD), nutrients (total organic carbon (TOC), total organic nitrogen (TON), inorganic nutrients), and abundances of microbial functional groups (Prochlorococcus, Synechococcus, picoeukaryotes, and heterotrophic microbes (unpigmented bacteria and archaea)), from reef depth waters. At 45 of the reefs, high-resolution photomosaics were used to examine the composition of benthic organisms. At 13 geographically dispersed reefs, we collected seawater (1.7 liters in biological triplicates) for both targeted and untargeted metabolomics analyses. Seawater (2 liters in duplicate) was collected at 26 sites, including the 13 examined for metabolomics, for taxonomic (bacteria and archaea 16S ribosomal RNA gene) and functional (shotgun metagenome) microbiome analyses, and chlorophyll. Given the stony coral tissue loss disease outbreak, we also targeted healthy and diseased coral tissue and near-coral seawater for taxonomic microbiome (16S rRNA gene) analysis (11 sites).
Significance: Microorganisms and the dissolved metabolites they process are central to the functioning of ocean ecosystems. These 'invisible' ocean components are poorly understood in biodiverse and productive coral reef ecosystems, where they contribute to nutrient cycling and signaling cues between reef organisms. Microbes and dissolved metabolites offer a new means to examine reef features and have applications for conservation, monitoring, and restoration efforts in these changing ecosystems.
For a complete list of measurements, refer to the full dataset description in the supplemental file 'Dataset_description.pdf'. The most current version of this dataset is available at: https://www.bco-dmo.org/dataset/890979NSF Division of Ocean Sciences (NSF OCE) OCE-173628
Experimental sump pCO2 data collected as part of a study of pCO2 variability on the reef-building coral Pocillopora damicornis conducted at Heron Island Research Station, Heron Island, southern Great Barrier Reef in 2021
No full textDataset: In-field and experimental measurements of environmental conditions: pCO2This dataset contains experimental sump pCO2 data. These data were collected as part of a study of pCO2 variability on the reef-building coral Pocillopora damicornis conducted at Heron Island Research Station, Heron Island, southern Great Barrier Reef in 2021 (Brown et al., 2022).
Abstract for all data from the study (Brown et al., 2022) including this dataset:
Ocean acidification is a growing threat to coral growth and the accretion of coral reef ecosystems. Corals inhabiting environments that already endure extreme diel pCO2 fluctuations, however, may represent acidification resilient populations capable of persisting on future reefs. Here, we examined the impact of pCO2 variability on the reef-building coral Pocillopora damicornis originating from reefs with contrasting environmental histories (variable reef flat vs. stable reef slope) following reciprocal exposure to stable (218 ± 9) or variable (911 ± 31) diel pCO2 amplitude (μtam) in aquaria over eight weeks. This study measured: growth (net calcification, extension, CaCO3 density) and physiology (dark respiration, light-enhanced dark respiration, host soluble protein, mycosporine-like amino acids, net photosynthesis, photosynthetic efficiency, endosymbiont density, chlorophyll a concentration, intracellular pH) of P. damicornis across treatment and origin.
See all datasets related to this publication (https://www.bco-dmo.org/related-resource/885684).
For a complete list of measurements, refer to the full dataset description in the supplemental file 'Dataset_description.pdf'. The most current version of this dataset is available at: https://www.bco-dmo.org/dataset/885674NSF Division of Ocean Sciences (NSF OCE) OCE-192374
Coral physiology parameters acquired during a heatwave experiment done September to November 2018 using reef building corals collected in Kāne'ohe Bay, O'ahu, Hawai'i.
No full textDataset: Heatwave Experiment: Multivariate PhysiologyTwo common reef-building corals, Montipora capitata and Pocillopora acuta, were collected from six sites in Kāne'ohe Bay, O'ahu, Hawai'i. Fragments were allowed to acclimate in experimental tanks for two weeks prior to exposure to one of the following four treatments: Ambient Temperature Ambient pCO2 (ATAC), Ambient Temperature High pCO2 (ATHC), High Temperature Ambient pCO2 (HTAC), and High Temperature High pCO2 (HTHC). The treatment period lasted for a two month period, starting on September 22nd, 2018 and lasting through November 17th, 2018. Following the stress period, coral fragments were exposed to a two-month recovery period in ambient conditions.
Throughout the entire four-month experiment, fragments were randomly sampled from each tank and treatment for the following physiology parameters: gross photosynthesis, respiration, net photosynthesis (gross photosynthesis - respiration), photosynthesis:respiration ratio, chlorophyll concentration (pigment a and c2), symbiont and host tissue biomass, symbiont:host tissue biomass ratio, host soluble protein, host total antioxidant capacity, and endosymbiont density. Net photosynthesis, chlorophyll concentration, and symbiont tissue biomass were normalized to host surface area (cm-2) and endosymbiont density (cell-1).
For a complete list of measurements, refer to the full dataset description in the supplemental file 'Dataset_description.pdf'. The most current version of this dataset is available at: https://www.bco-dmo.org/dataset/884544NSF Division of Ocean Sciences (NSF OCE) OCE-175662
Lifelong, learning-augmented robot navigation
Full text linkSubmitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution February 2023.Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the process by which a robot constructs a global model of an environment from local observations of it; this is a fundamental perceptual capability supporting planning, navigation, and control. We are interested in improving the expressiveness and operational longevity of SLAM systems. In particular, we are interested in leveraging state-of-the-art machine learning methods for object detection to augment the maps robots can build with object-level semantic information. To do so, a robot must combine continuous geometric information about its trajectory and object locations with discrete semantic information about object classes. This problem is complicated by the fact that object detection techniques are often unreliable in novel environments, introducing outliers and making it difficult to determine the correspondence between detected objects and mapped landmarks. For robust long-term navigation, a robot must contend with these discrete sources of ambiguity. Finally, even when measurements are not corrupted by outliers, long-term SLAM remains a challenging computational problem: typical solution methods rely on local optimization techniques that require a good “initial guess,” and whose computational expense grows as measurements accumulate. The first contribution of this thesis addresses the problem of inference for hybrid probabilistic models, i.e., models containing both discrete and continuous states we would like to estimate. These problems frequently arise when modeling e.g., outlier contamination (where binary variables indicate whether a measurement is corrupted), or when performing object-level mapping (where discrete variables may represent measurement-landmark correspondence or object categories). The former application is crucial for designing more robust perception systems. The latter application is especially important for enabling robots to construct semantic maps; that is, maps containing objects whose states are a mixture of continuous (geometric) information and (discrete) categorical information (such as class labels). The second contribution of this thesis is, a novel spectral initialization method which is efficient to compute, easy to implement, and admits the first formal performance guarantees for a SLAM initialization method. The final contribution of this thesis aims to curtail the growing computational expense of long-term SLAM. In particular, we propose an efficient algorithm for graph sparsification capable of reducing the computational burden of SLAM methods without significantly degrading SLAM solution quality. Taken together, these contributions improve the robustness and efficiency of robot perception approaches in the lifelong setting.This work was generously supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), ONR Neuro-Autonomy MURI grant N00014-19-1-2571, ONR grant N00014-18-1-2832, and the MIT-Portugal Program Flagship Project: Knowledge to Data
Alkalinity, Salinity, Bivalve Biomass, Streamflow and, Submerged Aquatic Vegetation in Tidal Tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay from 1984 to 2018.
Full text linkDataset: Alkalinity, salinity, bivalve biomass, streamflow, and submerged aquatic vegetation.Alkalinity, Salinity, Bivalve Biomass, Streamflow and Submerged Aquatic Vegetation in Tidal Tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay from 1984 to 2018.
For a complete list of measurements, refer to the full dataset description in the supplemental file 'Dataset_description.pdf'. The most current version of this dataset is available at: https://www.bco-dmo.org/dataset/887278NSF Division of Ocean Sciences (NSF OCE) OCE-1537013, NSF Division of Ocean Sciences (NSF OCE) OCE-1536996, NSF Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences (NSF AGS) AGS‐ 1560339, National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) NNX14AM37G, National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) NNX14AF93
Isotopic analysis of ¹³C and ¹⁵N for sponges, coral, and zooxanthellae (family Symbiodiniaceae) used in a 'pulse-chase' experiment to examine the uptake of sponge-derived nutrients by the coral holobiont
Full text linkDataset: Stable Isotope 13C and 15NThese are raw data from isotopic analysis of ¹³C and ¹⁵N for sponges, coral, and zooxanthellae (family Symbiodiniaceae) used in a 'pulse-chase' experiment to examine the uptake of sponge-derived nutrients by the coral holobiont. Coral were collected from the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and the experiments were carried out at the Climate and Acidification Ocean Simulator (CAOS) at Mote Marine Laboratory at Summerland Key, Florida, USA.
For a complete list of measurements, refer to the full dataset description in the supplemental file 'Dataset_description.pdf'. The most current version of this dataset is available at: https://www.bco-dmo.org/dataset/889857NSF Division of Ocean Sciences (NSF OCE) OCE-1924540, NSF Division of Ocean Sciences (NSF OCE) OCE-192396
Salinity tolerance of oysters without acclimation in lab conditions: mortality
No full textDataset: Salinity tolerance without acclimation: MortalityThe mortality of oyster spat spawned from four different wild broodstocks (first filial generation) was measured when exposed to five different salinities (without acclimation) under controlled laboratory conditions. Oyster broodstocks were sourced from two populations in Louisiana (Calcasieu Lake; 29°50′58′′N, 93°17′1′′W, and Vermilion Bay; 29°34′47′′N, 92°2′4′′W) and two populations in Texas (Packery Channel; 27°37′38′′N, 97°13′59′′W, and Aransas Bay; 28°7′38′′N, 96°59′8′′W). Mortality was recorded in oyster spat that were exposed to salinities of 2, 4, 20, 38 and 44 without acclimation under laboratory conditions. Changes in water quality and spat size were also recorded.
For a complete list of measurements, refer to the full dataset description in the supplemental file 'Dataset_description.pdf'. The most current version of this dataset is available at: https://www.bco-dmo.org/dataset/870210NSF Division of Ocean Sciences (NSF OCE) OCE-173720
North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium 2009 Annual Report Card
Full text linkThe North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) remains one of the most endangered large whales in the world. Over the past two decades, there has been increasing interest in addressing the problems hampering the recovery of North Atlantic right whales by using innovative research techniques, new technologies, analyses of existing databases, and enhanced conservation and education strategies. This increased interest demanded better coordination and collaboration among all stakeholders to ensure that there was improved access to data, research efforts were not duplicative, and that findings were shared with all interested parties. The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, initially formed in 1986 by five research institutions to share data among themselves, was expanded in 1997 to address these greater needs. Currently, the Consortium membership is comprised of representatives from more than 100 entities including: research, academic, and conservation organizations; shipping and fishing industries; whale watching companies; technical experts; United States (U.S.) and Canadian Government agencies; and state authorities. North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium members agreed in 2004 that an annual “report card” on the status of right whales would be useful. This report card includes updates on the status of the cataloged population, mortalities and injury events, and a summary of management and research efforts that have occurred over the previous 12 months. The Board’s goal is to make public a summary of current research and management activities, as well as provide detailed recommendations for future activities. The Board views this report as a valuable asset in assessing the effects of research and management over time.Island Foundation; Conference Fee