Eleven researchers from the Coastal Ecology Group of the Department of Ecology and Animal Biology, belonging to the Marine Research Center and the Applied Geotechnologies Group of the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Engineering of the University of Vigo, together with staff from the Atlantic Islands National Park, will work until January 2020 on the Alganat2000 project (Improving the management, monitoring and maintenance of biodiversity in protected marine areas using low-cost automated geospatial techniques for the monitoring and mapping of intertidal habitats). The Atlantic Islands National Park of Galicia and more specifically the Cíes Islands, will be the setting in which the experimental field work will be carried out and also where the transfer activities of the project will be organized, which with the objectives of contributing to the sustainable management of marine protected areas with fishing activity and maintaining marine biodiversity, will develop an automated and innovative methodology based on geospatial techniques, which combines the analysis of satellite images and those obtained from unmanned aerial vehicles for the in situ quantification of the abundance and physiological state of macroalgae. “Although it is only developed in the Atlantic Islands National Park, Alganat2000 would be applicable to other protected and non-protected marine areas, since it involves the design and development of a computer platform to detect the abundance and thermal range of intertidal macroalgae”, explains the ecologist from the University of Vigo and principal investigator (PI) of the project Celia Olabarria.
With a duration of one year and a total amount of close to 200,000 euros, Alganat2000 has 75% public funding, with the collaboration of the Biodiversity Foundation and the Ministry for Ecological Transition, through the Pleamar Program, which is co-financed by the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF). In addition to the development of an IT platform, the project will increase scientific and technical knowledge for the management, recovery and monitoring of protected marine areas and the transfer of results to the fishing sector and public administration bodies, responsible for management, promoting sustainable fishing.
Greater knowledge of marine habitats and monitoring of species
While researchers from the University of Vigo will be responsible for developing the technical part of the geospatial tool and its in situ validation, in addition to the dissemination and coordination of the project, the staff of the Atlantic Islands National Park of Galicia will take care of logistics and support the experimental field work of the scientists, as well as organizing the transfer activities, which include a training workshop to raise awareness with the fishing sector and administrative managers and another demonstration to present the tool.
Regarding the motivations for launching Alganat2000, Olabarria refers, on the one hand, to “the need to deepen knowledge of marine habitats and associated biodiversity, and on the other, to the convenience of carrying out spatio-temporal monitoring of the ecological state of protected habitats and species, as well as of marine invasive species, which pose a serious threat to the functioning of ecosystem services”, explains the professor and researcher at the University of Vigo.
Innovations and phases of the project
According to Olabarria, the innovations provided by Alganat2000 are both technical and social. In the case of technical innovations, the researcher from the University of Vigo points out four: that the new tool allows for a reduction in the cost of field sampling, “since we have moved from a field operation, which requires a lot of personnel, to a remote operation based on remote sensing”; global management of natural space, since a single satellite image can cover study areas on different islands; an improvement in the temporal frequency of sampling, since satellite images have review periods of a few days, as well as the integration of the resulting data into geographic information systems, which in turn can provide other types of geospatial data.
“On the other hand, at an ecophysiological level, we managed to relate in real time and in multiple areas simultaneously, the thermal range of the species during the emergence period, when it is most vulnerable, with its degree of physiological stress,” highlights the ecologist, who also points out that the project presents a quadruple helix social innovation model in which the university, fishing sector, public administration, society and the general public are involved.
The project, which starts this month with the analysis and evaluation of the initial information and the design of pilot cases for carrying out the field work, will continue with the quantification and evaluation of the physiological state of five species of macroalgae in situ, in 50X50 cm grids, arranged in an area of 10X10 m2. Through the use of drones, the study will be extended to larger areas and in a later phase, the acquisition, calibration and processing of satellite images and the development of image processing techniques will be carried out, which will allow the automatic analysis of the macroalgae data. “Once the image processing algorithm has been developed, the robustness of the result will be analyzed, developing procedures that will allow the methodology to be systematized”, explains Celia Olabarria.
Source: DUVI
