Effective Ecological Monitoring

Improving ecological monitoring

In summary, LTER systems can provide a standardized infrastructure to collect comparable data to answer the questions of today, and a rigorous scientific basis to address future challenges. We invite scientists to integrate stand-alone studies within innovative LTER approaches to provide future generations with the management tools to move beyond the confines of our current limited biodiversity...

Long-Term Ecological Monitoring

Knowledge Extraction from the Neural ‘Black Box’ in Ecological Monitoring

Phytoplankton biomass within the Saginaw Bay ecosystem (Lake Huron, Michigan, USA) was characterized as a function of select physical/chemical indicators. The complexity and variability of ecological systems typically make it difficult to model the influences of anthropogenic stressors and/or natural disturbances. Here, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) were developed to model chlorophyll a con...

Observer Design for Ecological Monitoring

Monitoring of ecological systems is one of the major issues in ecosystem research. The concepts and methodology of mathematical systems theory provide useful tools to face this problem. In many cases, state monitoring of a complex ecological system consists in observation (measurement) of certain state variables, and the whole state process has to be determined from the observed data. The solut...

Monitoring dynamic spatio-temporal ecological processes optimally.

Population dynamics vary in space and time. Survey designs that ignore these dynamics may be inefficient and fail to capture essential spatio-temporal variability of a process. Alternatively, dynamic survey designs explicitly incorporate knowledge of ecological processes, the associated uncertainty in those processes, and can be optimized with respect to monitoring objectives. We describe a coh...