Tracking denizens of the deep to protect their future
Dr Ana Sequeira's global collaborative projects were recently featured in the Pawsey Supercomputer Center's Science Showcase. The projects involve hundreds of researchers worldwide combining their tracking datasets and they have now collated over three decades of animal movement data.
11-Nov-2020 (written by Charlotte Birkmanis)
The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre's Science Showcase has recently featured SequeiraLab projects spearheaded by Dr Ana Sequeira. The projects featured involve hundreds of researchers worldwide, and aim to better understand marine animal movements, their environmental preferences, as well as overlaps with existing threats across our oceans. As a starting point towards that main goal, Ana and Malcolm led a simulation study using over 150,000 different simulated tracks, which was covered in the piece. These simulations test how the biases commonly associated with tracking data might affect identification of the most suitable habitats for the species, and how to define a best strategy to cope with gaps and biases in the real-world tracking data assembled. The main goal of the global project is to predict areas of high biodiversity value for highly migratory species and increase knowledge about these critical areas.
The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, a high-performance computing facility, is assisting with accelerating this research by providing supercomputing facilities as well as data cloud and visualisation services.
