PhD students

Philip Alexander Hedlund Smith 

Title of the PhD project
Big data analytics to support ecosystem-based risk management of marine ecosystems

Supervisors
Patrizio Mariani, Asbjørn Christensen and Michael St. John

Background of the project
Ocean dynamics are essential for the functioning of the Earth system with important effects on climate regulation and global biodiversity. Regional and global processes driving storage and transport of heat, carbon, nutrients, and marine organisms are crucial for providing many ecosystems’ goods and services that enable life on Earth. These processes are driven by mechanisms interacting and operating over wide ranges of spatial and temporal scales, and inherently involve both horizontal and vertical dimensions, making them exceedingly difficult to monitor and to understand fully.

About the project
The general objective is to determine and understand spatio-temporal dependencies, relations, and mutual effects in the abundant climate and biogeochemical data. The goal is to understand these relationships as well as constructing frameworks for predicting future behavior. Moreover, to establish systems where ocean and ecosystem dynamics are learned and can be emulated for different initial state values. Neural networks and deep learning approaches in particular display major advantages in exploiting spatio-temporal data and capturing nonlinear relations in data compared to classical approaches.

Perspectives
Generating deep learning frameworks to combine remotely sensed and in situ observations may improve estimates and models of subsurface ocean state variables, which presently can be difficult to monitor due to the scarcity of local measurements. Furthermore, predictive data-driven models that accurately reproduce simulation data may facilitate comprehensive risk analyses and assessments, as changes in simulation data for varying driver inputs may be considerably less time consuming.

Previous PhD students within the research area Observation Technology

Aurelia Pereira Gabellini
Ecological connectivity in the Atlantic Ocean: Past, present and future (link to thesis awaits publication)

Anshul Chauhan
Resolving marine ecosystem dynamics in time and space with machine learning approaches (link to thesis awaits publication)

Søren Lorenzen Post
Blue whiting (Micromesistius poutassou): behaviour and distribution in Greenland waters