A5037659729- Coral and Marine Ecosystems Studies
- Marine and fisheries research
- Species Distribution and Climate Change
- Marine and coastal plant biology
- Marine animal studies overview
- Geochemistry and Geologic Mapping
- Data Visualization and Analytics
- Economic and Environmental Valuation
- Marine Biology and Ecology Research
- Ichthyology and Marine Biology
- Coastal wetland ecosystem dynamics
- Advanced Clustering Algorithms Research
- Animal Vocal Communication and Behavior
- Bayesian Modeling and Causal Inference
- Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis
- Remote Sensing and LiDAR Applications
- Complex Network Analysis Techniques
- Coastal and Marine Management
- Gaussian Processes and Bayesian Inference
- African Botany and Ecology Studies
- Statistical Methods and Bayesian Inference
- Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies
- Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
- Wildlife Ecology and Conservation
- Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing
Queensland University of Technology
2012-2024
Australian Institute of Marine Science
2012-2023
ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers
2017-2021
The University of Queensland
2018-2021
ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies
2018-2021
Australian Research Council
2017-2021
Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute
2020
James Cook University
2020
Centre de Recherches Insulaires et Observatoire de l'Environnement
2009-2019
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
2011-2012
Outbreaks of the coral-killing seastar Acanthaster planci are intense disturbances that can decimate coral reefs. These events consist emergence large swarms predatory feed on reef-building corals, often leading to widespread devastation populations. While cyclic occurrences such outbreaks reported from many tropical reefs throughout Indo-Pacific, their causes hotly debated, and spatio-temporal dynamics impacts reef communities remain unclear. Based observations a recent event around island...
Ecosystem monitoring is central to effective management, where rapid reporting essential provide timely advice. While digital imagery has greatly improved the speed of underwater data collection for benthic communities, image analysis remains a bottleneck in observations. In recent years, evolution artificial intelligence recognition been evident its broad applications modern society, offering new opportunities increasing capabilities coral reef monitoring. Here, we evaluated performance...
Coral reefs are increasingly threatened by various types of disturbances, and their recovery is challenged accelerating, human-induced environmental changes. Recurrent disturbances reduce the pool mature adult colonies reef-building corals undermine post-disturbance from newly settled recruits. Using a long-term interannual data set, we show that coral assemblages on reef slope Moorea, French Polynesia, have maintained high capacity to recover despite unique frequency large-scale which,...
Abstract Anticipating future changes of an ecosystem's dynamics requires knowledge how its key communities respond to current environmental regimes. The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is under threat, with rapid reef‐building hard coral (HC) community structure already evident across broad spatial scales. While several underlying relationships between HC and multiple disturbances have been documented, responses other benthic are not well understood. Here we used statistical modelling explore the...
Karimunjawa National Park is one of Indonesia’s oldest established marine parks. Coral reefs across the park are being impacted by fishing, tourism and declining water quality (local stressors), as well climate change (global pressures). In this study, we apply a multivariate statistical model to detailed benthic ecological datasets collected Karimunjawa’s coral reefs, explore drivers community at level. Eighteen sites were surveyed in 2014 2018, before after 2016 global mass bleaching...
Building on a strong foundation of philosophy, theory, methods and computation over the past three decades, Bayesian approaches are now an integral part toolkit for most statisticians data scientists. Whether they dedicated Bayesians or opportunistic users, applied professionals can reap many benefits afforded by paradigm. In this paper, we touch six modern opportunities challenges in statistics: intelligent collection, new sources, federated analysis, inference implicit models, model...
There is growing awareness about the potential benefit of harnessing citizen science for research, particularly in biological and environmental sciences. Data quality a major constraint use citizen‐science data, particular, imperfect observations. In this paper, we fit species distribution models to presence‐only data (presences counts, with no absences observed) by exploiting uncertainty reported presences, instead generating pseudo‐absences as common previous studies. This approach allowed...
Aesthetic value, or beauty, is important to the relationship between humans and natural environments is, therefore, a fundamental socio-economic attribute of conservation alongside other ecosystem services. However, beauty difficult quantify not estimated well using traditional approaches monitoring coral-reef aesthetics. To improve estimation aesthetic values, we developed implemented novel framework used features aesthetics based on people's perceptions beauty. Three observer groups with...
Abstract Aim Increasingly frequent and intense disturbances of many kinds are reducing the populations habitat‐forming species. For example, disturbances, including coral bleaching, storms cyclones, disease Crown‐of‐Thorns starfish (CoTS) outbreaks, have been important contributors to global decline populations. Understanding these effects such is challenging but necessary for their effective management. In this paper, we provide a novel spatially temporally explicit perspective on role...
Abstract Preserving coral reef resilience is a major challenge in the Anthropocene, yet recent studies demonstrate failures of recovery from disturbance, globally. The wide and vigorous outer-reef system French Polynesia presents rare opportunity to assess ecosystem disturbances at large-scale equivalent size Europe. In this purpose, we analysed long-term data on community dynamics combine mixed-effects regression framework with set functional response models evaluate trajectories. Analyses...
Abstract Many research domains use data elicited from ‘citizen scientists’ when a direct measure of process is expensive or infeasible. However, participants may report incorrect estimates classifications due to their lack skill. We demonstrate how Bayesian hierarchical models can be used learn about latent variables interest, while accounting for the participants’ abilities. The model described in context an ecological application that involves crowdsourced georeferenced coral-reef images...
Recently, attempts to improve decision making in species management have focussed on uncertainties associated with modelling temporal fluctuations populations. Reducing model uncertainty is challenging; while larger samples estimation of trajectories and reduce statistical errors, they typically amplify variability observed trajectories. In particular, traditional approaches aimed at estimating population usually do not account well for nonlinearities multi-scale observations characteristic...
Immersive environments, and particularly Virtual Reality (VR), are providing exciting new ways of seeing our world. One challenge is the effective application this technology to solve large scale problems, make world a better place. Here in ARC Centre Excellence for Mathematical Statistical Frontiers at Queensland University Technology (QUT), we combine visual statistical capabilities that change happen. We use VR elicit information from "virtual scientists" (VS) hence facilitate "VR-VS...
Abstract This paper describes benthic coral reef community composition point-based field data sets derived from georeferenced photoquadrats using machine learning. Annually over a 17 year period (2002–2018), were collected downward-looking that capture an approximately 1 m 2 footprint along 100 m–1500 transect surveys distributed the slope and across flat of Heron Reef (28 km ), Southern Great Barrier Reef, Australia. Benthic for was automatically interpreted through deep learning, following...
Addressing the global decline of coral reefs requires effective actions from managers, policymakers and society as a whole. Coral reef scientists are therefore challenged with task providing prompt relevant inputs for science-based decision-making. Here, we provide baseline dataset, covering 1300 km tropical habitats globally, comprised over one million geo-referenced, high-resolution photo-quadrats analysed using artificial intelligence to automatically estimate proportional cover benthic...
Summary Crowdsourcing methods facilitate the production of scientific information by non‐experts. This form citizen science (CS) is becoming a key source complementary data in many fields to inform data‐driven decisions and study challenging problems. However, concerns about validity these often constrain their utility. In this paper, we focus on use addressing complex challenges environmental conservation. We consider issue from three perspectives. First, present literature scan papers that...
Subtropical reefs are important habitats for many marine species and tourism recreation. Yet, subtropical understudied, detailed habitat maps seldom available. Citizen science can help fill this gap, while fostering community engagement education. In study, 44 trained volunteers conducted an ecological assessment of Flinders Reef using established Check CoralWatch protocols. 2017, 10 sites were monitored to provide comprehensive information on reef communities estimate potential local...
Virtual reality (VR) technology is an emerging tool that supporting the connection between conservation research and public engagement with environmental issues. The use of VR in ecology consists interviewing diverse groups people while they are immersed within a virtual ecosystem to produce better information than more traditional surveys. However, at present, relatively high level expertise specific programming languages disjoint pathways required run experiments hinder their wider...