Haley Durbin Email and Phone Number

Marine aquaculture is a rapidly growing field in both technology and protected speciesmonitoring and mitigation. In the Pacific Islands Region, the Hawaiian monk seal (Monachusschauinslandi) is an endangered and endemic species whose range overlaps with open-waterfinfish netpens. After a 2017 fatality event involving a Hawaiian monk seal and netpen, NMFSand the farm are working to research interaction prevention, monitoring, and mitigation. Thisproject aimed to identify whether digital monitoring with cameras is an effective approach tomonitoring and understanding interactions between monk seals and offshore net pens and to determinewhether artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning can be trained to detect monk seals oncollected digital camera footage. After reviewing over 160 hours of camera footage and threeyears of human and diver observations, we determined that, when used together, humanobservations and camera footage are an effective way to identify monk seals interacting with theoffshore net pens. We also successfully trained AI to detect monk seals in camera footage, whichwill accelerate video review when monitoring for monk seals. Additional work is needed tofurther refine AI for this use; however, a combination of human-observed sightings and camerafootage is a strong approach to monitoring protected species interactions for marine aquaculture.Overall, this project showed the feasibility of machine learning technology to help both NMFSand aquaculture operators monitor and understand Hawaiian monk seal interactions with offshoreaquaculture operations.

This is a 10 week, NSF funded REU(Research Experience for Undergraduates) program. I am currently working on an individual research project with gray tree frogs. The experiment is testing the effect of nutrient availability and larval density on the development and survival of gray tree frogs to metamorphosis. To do this I have about 30, 1000L polyethylene tanks set up at Miami’s Ecology Research Center with various amounts of leaf litter and tadpole densities to test this theory.