Title: Using underwater remote sensing coupled with AI-assisted image analysis to quantify the impacts and consequences of disturbance in coral reef systems
Speaker: Kai Kopecky, ESIIL

Abstract:

While remote sensing tools have long been implemented on land, the application of these tools underwater has been slower due to environmental and logistical constraints. Recent progress in underwater photogrammetry (a form of remote sensing), however, has opened a new window through which our ability to investigate marine ecosystems is rapidly expanding. In this talk, I will discuss some of the approaches in underwater photogrammetry and AI-assisted image analysis that I have helped develop to study ecological change in coral reef systems, particularly in response to disturbances like marine heatwaves that cause coral bleaching. I will then introduce some of the work I am undertaking as a Postdoctoral Researcher at ESIIL, where I am exploring similar questions related to quantifying ecological change in both marine and terrestrial systems, and the consequences of these changes to ecosystem resilience.

Speaker Bio:

Kai is a community and marine ecologist and earned his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was involved with the NSF Moorea Coral Reef (MCR) Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site in French Polynesia. He is interested in how new disturbance regimes, brought on by global change, affect the capacity for ecosystems to recover after disturbances (i.e., ecosystem resilience). He combines remote sensing techniques, machine learning, field experimentation, time series analysis, and mathematical modeling to understand the consequences of changing disturbance regimes on the resilience of contemporary ecosystems. Now as a Postdoctoral Researcher at ESIIL, he is expanding beyond coral reefs to explore these research themes across both marine and terrestrial ecosystems though the LTER network and the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON).