Participants
Daniel Doolittle
I am currently pursuing a Ph. D in Marine Geology and Geophysics at the University of Miami. In 2003, I obtained a MS in Fisheries Science from the College of William and Mary, Virginia Institute of Marine Science. My previous Southern Ocean experience has been to conduct acoustic krill biomass and habitat surveys for the US Antarctic Marine Living Resources Program.
Main research interests:
Fisheries
Optical and acoustical assessment of fish populations, geological/biological habitat interactions, and underwater robotics.
Geology
Coastal geomorphology, coastal sediment dynamics, and remote classification of benthic environments.
Current research:
Application of ROV-based video technology to complement coral reef resource mapping and monitoring.
Development of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle technologies to support high-latitude fisheries oceanography.
Automated classification of side scan sonar imagery using neural
networks.
Icefish cruise goals:
Food supply and sediment distribution are often dominant controls on Antarctic benthic community diversity and population abundance. This is especially true for shallow water and shelf environments (where most ICEFISH trawling will occur). My primary goal for the cruise is to characterize surface sediment distribution to investigate potential influences of sediment type on distribution and abundance of benthic/pelagic fauna.
During ICEFISH, I will use multibeam and single beam acoustics to map sediment types along our cruise track and to characterize the sediment regimes throughout the fishing grounds we will occupy. Groundtruthing of the acoustic classification techniques will occur with measurements of the geo-acoustical properties of sediment cores taken throughout the cruise.
Other questions of interest which may be explored with this data include investigations on origin (in situ production or immigration/transport) and recording of modern (Holocene) oceanic environmental conditions.