“Getting the most out of deep-sea images for ecological assessment <https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/getting-the-most-out-of-deep-sea-images-for-ecological-assessment/?p112015>” – University of Southampton <https://www.southampton.ac.uk/>, Graduate School of the National Oceanography Centre Southampton <https://www.southampton.ac.uk/oes/>, PhD studentship within the Natural Environment Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership INSPIRE <http://inspire-dtp.ac.uk/> – the Interdisciplinary Southampton Partnership for Investigators Researching the Environment.
Monitoring benthic communities is a fundamental requirement for the conservation of habitats and sustainable development. Seabed imaging is increasingly used to assess these environments,
particularly with the use of remote and autonomous underwater vehicles capable of collecting >10,000 images in a day. Although both experts and machine learning are used to extract quantitative information from images, many questions remain regarding the influence of imaging methods on the derived ecological data and subsequent conclusions about the status of the environment. How much of what we know about these communities is being influenced by how we monitor them using imagery? The project will examine the effects of the using different image
capture and data generation methods, and the influence of machine learning algorithms on the resulting estimates of biodiversity. This work will help define best practise in the use of image-derived data for monitoring marine ecosystems, both in the UK regulatory context and more generally.
Supervisory team: Dr Blair Thornton <https://www.southampton.ac.uk/engineering/about/staff/bt1a15.page>, University of Southampton; Dr Jen Durden <http://noc.ac.uk/people/jdurden> and Dr Brian Bett <http://noc.ac.uk/people/bjb>, National Oceanography Centre; Dr Henk van Rein, Joint Nature Conservation Committee <https://jncc.gov.uk>
Application
Deadline: 03 January 2020
You can apply for fully-funded studentships (stipend and fees) from INSPIRE if you are a UK or EU national; have no restrictions on how long you can stay in the UK; have been
‘ordinarily resident’ in the UK for three years prior to the start of the project. Please see http://inspire-dtp.ac.uk/how-apply for more information on eligibility and how to apply. You can also find these details via FindAPhD <https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/getting-the-most-out-of-deep-sea-images-for-ecological-assessment/?p112015>