Newswise — ITHACA, N.Y. – To chase down a disease that threatens eelgrass – critical seaside meadows that support commercial fishing and promote coastal health – the National Science Foundation has awarded researchers from Cornell University, the Smithsonian Institution, University of California, Davis and the University of Central Florida with a three-year, $1.3 million grant.
By air, by sea and by terabyte on terra firma, the scientists will search for the pathogenic causes of eelgrass wasting disease on 36 sites along the Pacific Coast from Southern California to Alaska. When the disease strikes, eelgrass (Zostera marina), a type of seagrass, becomes infected with black-edged lesions, impeding photosynthesis – killing the grass and endangering coastal water health.
“The lesions eat away and kill the tissue, and then the whole blade can break off. The causative agent (Labyrinthula zosterae), is extremely infectious,” said co-principal investigator Drew Harvell, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University.
For the world’s ecosystems, seagrass is valuable, but it is perpetually threatened by pollution and climate change. It supplies habitats for salmon, crabs, trout and herring, filters nutrient pollution and protects the shore from erosion.
On this project, Harvell will join with co-principal investigator Carla Gomes, professor of computer science at Cornell University and the director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability, to develop a software application called Eelisa (pronounced eel-EYE-zah). After artificial intelligence training sessions, Eelisa will sort through thousands of seagrass blade images in minutes to expertly quantify lesions.
The researchers will apply artificial intelligence to problems in environmental sustainability by using algorithms and machine learning to train a computer to recognize eelgrass blade lesions and correctly identify and separate them from other causes, such as nicks, cuts or heat stress.
“We are trying to accelerate the process of identifying lesions on the seagrass blades,” said Gomes. “We’d like to have a consistent application to identify healthy versus unhealthy tissue, with an expert level of performance or better. That is the big picture.”
Emmett Duffy, director of the Marine Global Earth Observatories at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, is the grant’s lead investigator. Tim Hawthorne, at the University of Central Florida, will deploy drones to provide high-resolution, sub-meter imagery of coastal seagrass beds.
The entire seagrass team will meet in November to plan for field sampling next summer.
Harvell said the research follows a large ocean heat wave responsible for the high levels of eelgrass wasting disease.
“The combination of a heat-facilitated pathogen and record warming ocean events has been devastating eelgrass beds,” Harvell said. “And we think this disease is capable of reducing eelgrass meadows more. It’s an urgent priority to find better ways to manage disease in warming oceans.”
Cornell University has television, ISDN and dedicated Skype/Google+ Hangout studios available for media interviews. For additional information, see this Cornell Chronicle story.
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