Dr Sari Giering, NOC and Dr Robert Blackwell, CEFAS provided a joint overview of the role and opportunity of AI in oceanic plankton monitoring.
Sari is a researcher at the National Oceanography Centre. Her research interests focus on how marine organisms influence the capacity of the ocean to store carbon. Her research combines shipboard measurements, laboratory analyses, data synthesis and numerical modelling. Examples of her work include her data synthesis and modelling effort that resulted in the world’s first balanced carbon budget for the deep sea.
Rob is an environmental data scientist at The Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science and a visiting research fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Rob helps marine scientists to implement data intensive scientific computing solutions using bespoke software development, computer vision, machine learning, modelling, artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
Zooplankton biodiversity contributes to multiple marine ecosystem services including carbon and nutrient cycling, as well as food webs. Long term time series and large-scale data sets are based on traditional net sampling, but new high speed camera systems provide high resolution, in-situ imaging. These new instruments generate terabytes of data per day, creating challenges for observation, data transmission and storage. They are building a real time plankton reporting system using Edge AI and cloud computing. They will talk about the system as well as challenges of convincing ecologists to trust artificial intelligence.
Further information and details, this and the wider webinar series is online at https://digitalenvironment.org/webinars/cde-webinar-series-upcoming/#blackwell .