Collaborative Research: Ideas Lab: ETAUS Passive Localized Underwater Transiting Observing Systems (PLUTOS)

随着气候的变化，生物的丰度和分布也随之发生变化，从最小的单细胞生物到最大的鲸鱼。观测这些变化对于模拟和理解海洋的物理和化学特性与生态因素的关系至关重要。被动定位水下过境观测系统（PLUTOS）项目将研究水下声音与海洋生物之间的联系，为科学家提供水下“鼻子”和“耳朵”，通过声音和它们留下的细胞来探测动物。 当动物在海洋中发出声音时，它们表明它们的存在;同样，这些生物在环境中移动时会释放DNA，环境DNA（eDNA）的浓度与生物体的数量和它们在海洋中居住的时间成正比。在这个项目中，PLUTOS的设计将用于研究沿海环境中海豹、鱼类和桡足类的食物网关系。PLUTOS项目将包括多个低成本的漂流自动记录仪，每个系统都被压载以遵循水柱中的设定密度，以便当漂流者随着水流移动时，每个目标深度都被集中感知和采样。PLUTOS背后的基本思想是，包括定向音景（例如，环境中的3D局部声源），eDNA收集和实时传感，以及溶解氧和温度等环境特性，将阐明将生态系统，eDNA持久性和运输，深度依赖性定向声景和沿海食物网生态联系在一起的空间和时间变化。设计将包括生态友好材料和非破坏性被动声学导航技术的可行性研究。该项目将包括：1）采用低成本、开源的漂移系统，解决现有系统在成本和有效载荷方面的限制; 2）开发和评估紧凑、低成本和低功率的物种特异性原位eDNA传感器的性能; 3）开发用于定向声景处理的新方法，使用阵列处理和机器学习方法来提供个体的定位以及海豹种群的密度和分布估计。由此产生的系统将被用来评估的假设，物种特异性的声景信息之间的相关性（海豹的叫声）和eDNA信息（海豹、鱼类、和桡足类）提供了关于食物网参与者的丰度和密度相对于时间和空间相对于单一食物网的信息增益。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值进行评估，被认为值得支持和更广泛的影响审查标准。

With the changing climate, there is an accompanying change in the abundance and distribution of organisms from the smallest single celled organisms to the largest whales. Observing these changes is critical to modeling and understanding the relationship of physical and chemical properties of the ocean to ecological factors. The Passive Localized Underwater Transiting Observing Systems (PLUTOS) project will study links between underwater sound and biology in the ocean, providing scientists with underwater "noses" and "ears" to detect animals by their sounds and the cells they leave behind. When animals make sounds in the ocean, they are indicating their presence; similarly, those same creatures shed DNA as they move through the environment, and that environmental DNA (eDNA) persists with concentration in proportion to the number of organisms and the time since they have inhabited a particular location in the ocean. For this project, the PLUTOS design will be used to look at the food web relationship of seals, fish, and copepods in coastal environments.The PLUTOS project will include multiple low-cost drifting autonomous loggers, each system is ballasted to follow a set density in the water column such that when each targeted depth is intensively sensed and sampled as the drifter moves with the currents. The fundamental idea behind PLUTOS is that clustering of multi-modal data streams including directional soundscape (e.g., 3D localized sound sources in the environment), eDNA collection and real-time sensing, and environmental properties like dissolved oxygen and temperature, will illuminate the spatial and temporal variability linking ecosystems, eDNA persistence and transport, depth-dependent directional soundscape, and coastal food web ecology together. Design will include feasibility studies of eco-friendly materials and non-disruptive passive acoustic navigation techniques. The project will include: 1) Adapting a low-cost, open-source, drifter system that addresses limitation in cost and payload of existing systems; 2) Developing and assessing the performance of species-specific in-situ eDNA sensors that are compact and low-cost and low-power; 3) Developing new approaches for directional soundscape processing, using array processing and machine learning approaches to provide localization of individuals as well as density and distribution estimates for seal populations. The resulting system will be used to evaluate the hypothesis that correlations between species-specific soundscape information (seal calls) and eDNA information (eDNA detection of seals, fish, and copepods) provide information gain on abundance and density of food web participants versus time and space versus single-variate information.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.