ZOOPS

Scripps Phytoplankton Camera

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Our latest underwater imaging system, the Scripps Phytoplankton Camera (SPC-P), was deployed at the end of Scripps Pier on Sept 19, 2014 and has been running for several weeks collecting over 30,000 images per day. Click on the images below to visit the site:

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From the site:

The Scripps Phytoplankton Camera (SPC-P) was developed under a grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation and an anonymous donor to the Scripps Inst. of Oceanograpy, and in cooperation with the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System (SCCOOS). The SPC-P is an underwater darkfield microscope with real-time image processing and object detection. It was designed to detect objects from a few microns up to several millimeters. It employs darkfield illumination. Data from the SPC-P are transferred in real-time to a webserver and database that support an interactive web tool for browsing images and exploring image statistics.

Inter-Calibration Cruise With ZOOPS

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Last month we had a successful inter-calibration cruise with our zooplankton imaging system ZOOPS. We configured the system to record simultaneous stereo images and broadband acoustic reflections from individual zooplankton. After two days of hard work we had over 40,000 image pairs and acoustic reflections. We are now sifting through the data to find records where the animal was in both camera images and the acoustic beam at the same time. We plan to use these to better understand the relationship between taxa, size, shape, and orientation of the animals and their acoustic scattering signatures.

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Tara Knight documented the entire cruise with video and still images including the image shown above.

Some examples of the of data we were looking for are shown below. Each image gives a roughly orthogonal view of the animal being insonified while the matched filtered acoustic envelope (the red curve below the left image) shows the scattering strength and range of the animal. We hope to estimate the size and orientation of the animals from the image data and then compare the measured acoustic data to well-established scattering models.

 

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Control Volume Grazing in Coastal Ecosystems

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The Jaffe Lab is collaborating with Dr. Stephen Monismith from Stanford University and Dr. Amatzia Genin from the Interuniversity Institute of Marine Science to study Flow and Grazing on Coral and Temperate Rocky Reefs as part of the Control Volume Grazing in Coastal Ecosystems research project. As part of the study, two of our broadband acoustic and optical zooplankton imaging systems are being deployed to estimate zooplankton abundance upstream and downstream in a flow field.

 

For more information about the program visit the Control Volume Grazing in Coastal Ecosystems website.

For more information about our sonar systems see ZOOPS