NOAA fisheries has advanced a series of strategic initiatives intended to transform and enhance ecosystem surveys through development and operationalization of systems that take advantage of…

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) awarded a $449,821 Cooperative Agreement to Oregon State University (OSU) under the Cooperative Institute (Inter-Agency Funded Activities) program (CFDA 11.405). The purpose of this 3-year award, which runs from September 1, 2024 to August 31, 2027, is to develop automated end-to-end pipelines for processing optical data on marine plankton. Specifically, OSU will integrate instrumentation that collects optical images of phytoplankton and zooplankton, along with software to classify the images into taxonomic groups, in order to rapidly process large datasets from shipboard and autonomous observation programs. This work supports NOAA's strategic initiative to transform and enhance ecosystem surveys through advanced technologies. The award will fund technical expertise to implement these optical data processing pipelines, which will increase the scope, resolution, and efficiency of NOAA's marine observation programs.

NOAA fisheries has advanced a series of strategic initiatives intended to transform and enhance ecosystem surveys through development and operationalization of systems that take advantage of advanced technologies to increase the scope, resolution, and efficiency of observation programs. Of these, the optics strategic initiative (OSI) will facilitate development of automated end-to-end, acquisition-toanalysis pipelines for the main nmfs optical data domains (fish, benthic, aerial, plankton). To achieve these goals, efforts will focus on integrating powerful image processing tools in an accessible user interface to facilitate increased efficiency in data processing, and regional trials and classifier training with unique regional fauna will test these new tools within the framework of existing observational monitoring programs. To support the goals of the OSI, we will provide technical expertise to development and implement pipelines for optical plankton data. These pipelines will integrate instrumentation that collects optical images of phyto- and zooplankton and software that is trained to classify images into taxonomic groups and subsequently applied to rapidly process vast data sets of shipboard and autonomously collected observations.