New ARCTOS PhD: Ana Sofia Aniceto

On Tuesday, June 19th, Ana Sofia Aniceto successfully defended her PhD project at UiT, entitled:

‘Unmanned aerial vehicles for marine mammal surveys in arctic and sub-arctic regions’.

Sofia’s main objective was to improve and develop the knowledge concerning surveys of marine biota using autonomous systems, particularly the current state of the art and its applicability in offshore regions, imagery analysis, and survey planning.

The key conclusions of her thesis are:

  1. When designing monitoring surveys first consider the survey objectives and cost-benefit trade-offs.
  2. It is important to understand the effects of environmental and technical factors on data acquisition and analyses that may affect image analysis.
  3. The deployment of multiple aircrafts should take place to ensure that the animals are detected in at least one of the vehicles, considering their diving behavior.

Sofia’s thesis consists of one published article and two manuscripts:

  • Article I: Aniceto, A. S., M. Biuw, U. Lindstrøm, S. A. Solbø, F. Broms, and J. Carroll. 2018. Monitoring marine mammals using unmanned aerial vehicles: quantifying detection certainty. Ecosphere 9(3):e02122. 10.1002/ecs2.2122
  • Article II: Verfuss U.K., Aniceto A.S., Harris D., Gillespie D., Fielding S., Jiménez G., Johnston P., Plunkett R., Sivertsen A., Solbø S.A., Storvold R., Biuw M., Wyatt R. (Manusript). A review of autonomous vehicles for detection and monitoring of marine fauna
  • Article III: Aniceto A.S., Biuw M., Lindstrøm U., Marques T., and Carroll J (Manuscript). Unmanned aerial vehicles in whale research: using multiple aircraft.

Sofia’s supervisors have been Professor JoLynn Carroll (Akvaplan-niva, Norway), Dr. Martin Biuw, Institute of Marine Research, and Dr. Ulf Lindstrøm, Institute of Marine Research

We congratulate Sofia on her successful defense and wish her all the best for her future career.

All pictures were kindly provided by: Torger Grytå, UiT