The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded nearly $2.2 million to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Woods Hole Oceanography Institution for a project that will develop tools to help scientists better understand ocean ecosystems.

RPI professors Peter Fox and Charles Stewart, experts in the study of ocean ecosystems and computer vision systems, respectively, will join WHOI oceanographers and computer scientists in analyzing and interpreting data from the organization's underwater imaging systems. By analyzing underutilized data, the team hopes to help researchers discover important information about the health of our oceans.

High-tech underwater imaging devices developed by WHOI include the FlowCytobot, an automated underwater microscope that identifies and counts phytoplankton — an important indicator of ecosystem health, biodiversity, and environmental contamination; SeaBED, an autonomous underwater vehicle that takes highly detailed images of the seafloor at depths of up to six thousand feet; and HabCam, an underwater habitat mapping camera system that can collect five to six images a second for days at a time.

"A massive amount of data about the oceans is gathered every single day by sensors, cameras, sonar, and other technologies," said Fox. "Maybe three percent of that information is ever even looked at again. Any other valuable knowledge is essentially lost. This makes the return on investment to create this data extremely low, monetarily and scientifically. What we are doing through this collaboration is integrating and enhancing this data so that it can be more easily consumed and used by other scientists and the public."