Her­mann Neuhaus Prize for Ar­jun Chennu

Vi­tal mar­ine hab­it­ats such as coral reefs are un­der threat from a vari­ety of global and local stressors. Mon­it­or­ing these hab­it­ats through un­der­wa­ter sur­veys is es­sen­tial, but re­quires con­sid­er­able lo­gist­ical and tech­nical ef­fort.

Ar­jun Chennu and a team of re­search­ers at the Max Planck In­sti­tute in Bre­men and Aus­tralian In­sti­tute for Mar­ine Sci­ences in Towns­ville have de­veloped a new tech­nique to pro­duce more ob­ject­ive, rapid and cost-ef­fi­cient hab­itat sur­vey res­ults than pre­vi­ously pos­sible. Us­ing a novel un­der­wa­ter in­stru­ment called Hy­per­Diver, they re­cor­ded highly de­tailed spec­tral pic­tures and to­po­graphic pro­files of coral reefs. They then showed how ma­chine learn­ing can be used to auto­mate the ana­lysis of biod­iversity of the reefs. The same data can also be used to meas­ure the state of pig­ment­a­tion and bleach­ing of cor­als, thus greatly re­du­cing the ana­lysis ef­fort re­quired to un­der­stand the health status of coral reefs.