Contextualized Monitoring in the Marine Environment
Marine mammal monitoring has seen improvements in the last few decades with advances made to both the monitoring hardware and post-processing computation methods. The addition of tag-based hydrophones, Fastloc GPS units, and an ever-increasing array of IMU sensors, coupled with the use of energetics...
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| Other Authors: | , , , |
| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/169756 https://doi.org/10.7302/2801 |
| Summary: | Marine mammal monitoring has seen improvements in the last few decades with advances made to both the monitoring hardware and post-processing computation methods. The addition of tag-based hydrophones, Fastloc GPS units, and an ever-increasing array of IMU sensors, coupled with the use of energetics proxies such as Overall Dynamic Body Acceleration (ODBA), has led to new insights into marine mammal swimming behavior that would not be possible using traditional secondary-observer methods. However, these advances have primarily been focused on and implemented in wild animal tracking, with less attention paid to the managed environment. This is a particularly important gap, as the cooperative nature of managed animals allows for research on swimming kinematics and energetics behavior with an intricacy that is difficult to achieve in the wild. While proxy-based methods are useful for relative inter-or-intra-animal comparisons, they are not robust enough for absolute energetics estimates for the animals, which can limit our understanding of their metabolic patterns. Proxies such as ODBA are based on filtered on-animal IMU data, and measure the aggregate high-pass acceleration as an estimate for the magnitude of the animal’s activity level at a given point in time. Depending on its body structure and locomotive gait, tag placement on the animal and the specific filtering techniques used can significantly impact the results. Any relation made to energetics is then strictly a mapping: a relation that may apply well to an individual or group under specific experimental conditions, but is not generalizable. To address this gap, this dissertation presents new tag-based hardware and data processing methods for persistently estimating cetacean swimming kinematics and energetics, which are functional in both managed and wild settings. Unfortunately, localization techniques for managed environments have not been thoroughly explored, so a new animal tracking method is required to spatially contextualize information on swimming ... |
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