Rick Towler's research while affiliated with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other places

... These concepts have recently been expanded to the marine environment. Restrictions on survey crews owing to the Covid-19 pandemic created an opportunity to deploy unmanned drones to survey large tracts of ocean for fisheries surveys that had previously only been performed by human-crewed vessels, and similar efforts are ongoing around the world (De Robertis et al., 2021). In addition to performing autonomous surveys, such devices also offer opportunities to observe fish in their environment and their response to things like fishing gears, promising to greatly improve our understanding of the mechanical underpinnings of gear efficiency, bycatch, and other challenges. ...

... Submersibles have long been utilized for biological surveys in depths beyond that accessible by SCUBA (Fricke & Meischner 1985;Lorance et al. 2000;Lindsay & Hunt 2005;Baker et al. 2021). Typically, these submersibles have been owned by nation states and operated by national or academic research institutions (e.g., Grassle et al. 1975;Hissmann & Schauer 2017). ...

... To generate a volumetric density of fish (number of fish per m 3 ) for each video deployment, we followed the methods of Williams et al. (2018) to convert the viewable area into a volume. We then used the average number of each species identified in all five frames to generate an average density of rockfish for each video deployment conducted. ...

... The total set of Ediacaran data exhibits strong metacommunity structure, consistent with previous analyses that resolve multiple assemblages [7][8][9]. Both the total dataset and the individual assemblages have relatively low numbers of nonrandom co-occurrences (9.8% to 16.7%) compared to many extant analyses (e.g., 35% to 63% [60,61]) as well as terrestrial fossil communities (such as averaging 64% aggregated pairs from the Carboniferous to the Holocene, and 37% from the Holocene to the present [62], although percentages of nonrandom co-occurrences are similar to at least some extant benthic communities (16.3%) [63]. Previous spatial analyses of Avalonian communities have revealed limited interspecific interactions [11,14] and limited environmental associations between taxa within communities [12], so the large number of nonsignificant correlations within the Avalon assemblage are consistent with previous work. ...

... This average background image was then subtracted from the raw images in the profile. These corrected images were further processed to remove the variable ambient illumination by pixel-wise median filtering among sequential images, similar to the technique used in (McFarlane and Schofield, 1995;Williams et al., 2016). The flat fielding and adaptive background subtraction preprocessing step provided a neutral background image to facilitate image segmentation. ...

... Analysing such large volumes of video footage can be labour-intensive, tedious, error-prone, subjective, and costly. Most fisheries using EM only analyse a sample of the data collected, and thus do not fully utilize the large amounts of data captured (Wallace et al., 2015). For example, in Australia's federally managed fisheries, a minimum of 10% of the video footage is reviewed (AFMA, 2019;Gerner, 2015). ...

... However, through the UN's Decade of Ocean Science and its affiliated programmes, e.g. the Deep Ocean Observing Strategy (https://www.deepoceanobserving.org/), efforts are being made to better characterise, model, and predict the physical oceanography of the deep ocean. Publicly available biological/distribution data is also lackinga critical component needed for not only building/training HSMs but also for independently validating HSMs (Anderson et al., 2016;Rooper et al., 2016Rooper et al., , 2018Howell et al., 2022). Where possible, distribution and density data on sponge aggregations should be made publicly available, such as through the ICES VME Database (https ://www.ices.dk/data/data-portals/Pages/vulnerable-marine-ecosyst ...

... Contingent upon the foundation present they identified with the assistance of color [3]. The dataset considered for testing is mostly self-collected through using cameras with large pixels and lightings [4]. A tale numerous fish track framework on Viterbi information affiliation [10] to discover a temporary coordinate in the loud submerged condition [5]. ...

... The underwater stereo video was also used to determine population counts and spatial and temporal frequencies, incorporating detection and identification [34]. Stereo vision is also integrated for video-based tracking [35], fish volume monitoring [36] or abundance [37], and 3D tracking of free-swimming fish [38]. ...

... For phocids in particular, the use of infrared cameras as an alternative method to detect seals during large-scale aerial surveys is a relatively new approach. Studies of seals in Arctic regions of Russia and Alaska (USA) that incorporate thermal imaging have focused on ice-associated seals that provide a stark thermal contrast to their sea-ice habitat (Chernook et al. 2014;Conn et al. 2014;Sigler et al. 2015). Surveys of seals in the United Kingdom, however, have shown infrared technology to be highly effective at detecting harbor seals against rocky substrates (Cunningham et al. 2010;Thompson et al. 2019). ...