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

随着气候的变化，从最小的单细胞生物到最大的鲸鱼，生物的丰度和分布也随之发生变化。观察这些变化对于模拟和理解海洋的物理和化学性质与生态因素的关系至关重要。被动定位水下传输观测系统（PLUTOS）项目将研究水下声音和海洋生物之间的联系，为科学家提供水下“鼻子”和“耳朵”，通过动物的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也会脱落DNA，而环境DNA （eDNA）的浓度与生物的数量和它们在海洋中居住的特定位置的时间成正比。在这个项目中，PLUTOS设计将用于研究沿海环境中海豹、鱼类和桡足类动物的食物网关系。PLUTOS项目将包括多个低成本的漂流式自动记录仪，每个系统都有压舱，以跟随水柱中的设定密度，这样当漂流器随着水流移动时，每个目标深度都能被集中感知和采样。PLUTOS背后的基本思想是多模态数据流的聚类，包括定向声景（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属性，将阐明生态系统、eDNA持久性和运输、依赖深度的定向声景和沿海食物网生态之间的时空变化。设计将包括环保材料和无干扰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、开源的漂流系统，解决现有系统的成本和有效载荷限制；2)开发和评估紧凑、低成本、低功耗的物种特异性原位eDNA传感器的性能；3)开发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定位以及海豹种群的密度和分布估计。由此产生的系统将用于评估特定物种的声景信息（海豹叫声）和eDNA信息（海豹、鱼类和桡足类的eDNA检测）之间的相关性，这些相关性提供了食物网参与者的丰度和密度的信息增益，而不是时间和空间的单一变量信息。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.