Award: OCE-1419987

Intellectual Merit: Through a combination of traditional net sampling and innovative plankton imaging, we examined the planktonic community in unprecedented spatial resolution to assess predator-prey co-occurrence across fine- to meso-scales within the Straits of Florida, a strong western boundary current oceanographic system. We conducted two major 18-d oceanographic cruises in the Straits of Florida - one each in the summers of 2014 and 2015, both on the RV Walton Smith. Specifically, our work measured scales of patchiness for a wide diversity of co-occurring zooplankton from protists to gelatinous predators. By combining in situ imagery and individual otolith analysis, we examined how spatial relationships to their prey and predators influenced larval fish growth and survival. We examined relationships between spatial distributions and larval fish growth under both open ocean and frontal (eddy) physical environments. Further, >100TB of imagery data created a Big Data problem that necessitated the development of an image analysis (i.e., image classification) algorithm and processing pipeline to facilitate our project imagery analysis needs. This automated image analysis pipeline is available to the oceanographic community. Thus far, this project has supported nine scientific publications (published/in review), six additional publications that are in final preparation, and one published dataset. Broader Impacts: The project provided training and research experience for a total of 54 diverse personnel. Five total faculty included two PIs, one collaborating faculty member from Rutgers, one OSU Research faculty member handling the ichthyological collections, and one CGRB faculty collaborating on image processing. Seven total postdocs and seven graduate students participated in some capacity. Two senior research associates and two research associates participated in the cruises, and three short-term research assistants helped prepare the ISIIS imagery for the Kaggle National Science Data Bowl competition. Three REU students participated in the cruises and worked up some of the data as summer projects. Finally, a total of 25 undergraduates volunteered, earned research credit, or were paid to help sort the MOCNESS ichthyoplankton samples or process ISIIS imagery. Beyond this personnel involvement and experience, additional participation occurred through project outreach via multiple outlets: (1) The first-ever Kaggle National Science Bowl, whereby our data were used to challenge the data science community to devise an algorithm to automatically classify plankton from segmented images. The complexity of the data as well as a large prize supplied by Booz-Allen Hamilton enticed over 1000 teams to participate, leading to three top classification algorithms which were implemented as part of this project; (2) Continued interactions with the public through supplying imagery data and blogs to Plankton Portal, an outreach effort we developed together with Zooniverse to enable the general public to actively help classify plankton images (>11,000 participants since 2013); (3) HMSC's annual Marine Science Day where we introduce 2000+ local Oregon residents to plankton and ISIIS; (4) Workshops with middle school girls, summer camp groups, teachers, media groups, and artists to introduce them to plankton and larval fishes with hands-on sample contact; (5) Career talks with local high school students targeting homeless populations; (6) Guest lectures in upper-class undergraduate classes; (7) Creation of cruise videos that are available to the public; and (8) General communications regarding the project via the lab website, cruise blog, facebook, and twitter. Last Modified: 11/28/2018 Submitted by: Robert K Cowen