In a'transformational' discovery, scientists have discovered the strongest evidence of life on a distant alien planet. Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers found huge quantities of chemicals produced by life on Earth in the atmosphere of the planet K2-18b. According to scientists from the University of Cambridge, an'ocean that is teeming with life' is the best explanation for this stunning discovery. MailOnline has used AI to take scientists' best predictions and imagine what life might be like on K2-18b. The most likely scenario is that K2-18b's oceans are filled with something like phytoplankton - microscopic organisms that feed on the energy from the nearby star.

Phytoplankton are a crucial component of aquatic ecosystems, and effective monitoring of them can provide valuable insights into ocean environments and ecosystem changes. Traditional phytoplankton monitoring methods are often complex and lack timely analysis. Therefore, deep learning algorithms offer a promising approach for automated phytoplankton monitoring. However, the lack of large-scale, high-quality training samples has become a major bottleneck in advancing phytoplankton tracking. In this paper, we propose a challenging benchmark dataset, Multiple Phytoplankton Tracking (MPT), which covers diverse background information and variations in motion during observation. The dataset includes 27 species of phytoplankton and zooplankton, 14 different backgrounds to simulate diverse and complex underwater environments, and a total of 140 videos. To enable accurate real-time observation of phytoplankton, we introduce a multi-object tracking method, Deviation-Corrected Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Tracker(DSFT), which addresses issues such as focus shifts during tracking and the loss of small target information when computing frame-to-frame similarity. Specifically, we introduce an additional feature extractor to predict the residuals of the standard feature extractor's output, and compute multi-scale frame-to-frame similarity based on features from different layers of the extractor. Extensive experiments on the MPT have demonstrated the validity of the dataset and the superiority of DSFT in tracking phytoplankton, providing an effective solution for phytoplankton monitoring.

Phytoplankton, a crucial component of aquatic ecosystems, requires efficient monitoring to understand marine ecological processes and environmental conditions. Traditional phytoplankton monitoring methods, relying on non-in situ observations, are time-consuming and resource-intensive, limiting timely analysis. To address these limitations, we introduce PhyTracker, an intelligent in situ tracking framework designed for automatic tracking of phytoplankton. PhyTracker overcomes significant challenges unique to phytoplankton monitoring, such as constrained mobility within water flow, inconspicuous appearance, and the presence of impurities. Our method incorporates three innovative modules: a Texture-enhanced Feature Extraction (TFE) module, an Attention-enhanced Temporal Association (ATA) module, and a Flow-agnostic Movement Refinement (FMR) module. These modules enhance feature capture, differentiate between phytoplankton and impurities, and refine movement characteristics, respectively. Extensive experiments on the PMOT dataset validate the superiority of PhyTracker in phytoplankton tracking, and additional tests on the MOT dataset demonstrate its general applicability, outperforming conventional tracking methods. This work highlights key differences between phytoplankton and traditional objects, offering an effective solution for phytoplankton monitoring.

Marine chlorophyll which is present within phytoplankton are the basis of photosynthesis and they have a high significance in sustaining ecological balance as they highly contribute toward global primary productivity and comes under the food chain of many marine organisms. Imbalance in the concentrations of phytoplankton can disrupt the ecological balance. The growth of phytoplankton depends upon the optimum concentrations of physiochemical constituents like iron, nitrates, phosphates, pH level, salinity, etc. and deviations from an ideal concentration can affect the growth of phytoplankton which can ultimately disrupt the ecosystem at a large scale. Thus the analysis of such constituents has high significance to estimate the probable growth of marine phytoplankton. The advancements of remote sensing technologies have improved the scope to remotely study the physiochemical constituents on a global scale. The machine learning techniques have made it possible to predict the marine chlorophyll levels based on physiochemical properties and deep learning helped to do the same but in a more advanced manner simulating the working principle of a human brain. In this study, we have used machine learning and deep learning for the Bay of Bengal to establish a regression model of chlorophyll levels based on physiochemical features and discussed its reliability and performance for different regression models. This could help to estimate the amount of chlorophyll present in water bodies based on physiochemical features so we can plan early in case there arises a possibility of disruption in the ecosystem due to imbalance in marine phytoplankton.

We start by discussing the link between ecosystem simulators and general AI. Then we present the open-source ecosystem simulator Ecotwin, which is based on the game engine Unity and operates on ecosystems containing inanimate objects like mountains and lakes, as well as organisms such as animals and plants. Animal cognition is modeled by integrating three separate networks: (i) a \textit{reflex network} for hard-wired reflexes; (ii) a \textit{happiness network} that maps sensory data such as oxygen, water, energy, and smells, to a scalar happiness value; and (iii) a \textit{policy network} for selecting actions. The policy network is trained with reinforcement learning (RL), where the reward signal is defined as the happiness difference from one time step to the next. All organisms are capable of either sexual or asexual reproduction, and they die if they run out of critical resources. We report results from three studies with Ecotwin, in which natural phenomena emerge in the models without being hardwired. First, we study a terrestrial ecosystem with wolves, deer, and grass, in which a Lotka-Volterra style population dynamics emerges. Second, we study a marine ecosystem with phytoplankton, copepods, and krill, in which a diel vertical migration behavior emerges. Third, we study an ecosystem involving lethal dangers, in which certain agents that combine RL with reflexes outperform pure RL agents.

Modeling real-world phenomena is a focus of many science and engineering efforts, such as ecological modeling and financial forecasting, to name a few. Building an accurate model for complex and dynamic systems improves understanding of underlying processes and leads to resource efficiency. Towards this goal, knowledge-driven modeling builds a model based on human expertise, yet is often suboptimal. At the opposite extreme, data-driven modeling learns a model directly from data, requiring extensive data and potentially generating overfitting. We focus on an intermediate approach, model revision, in which prior knowledge and data are combined to achieve the best of both worlds. In this paper, we propose a genetic model revision framework based on tree-adjoining grammar (TAG) guided genetic programming (GP), using the TAG formalism and GP operators in an effective mechanism to incorporate prior knowledge and make data-driven revisions in a way that complies with prior knowledge. Our framework is designed to address the high computational cost of evolutionary modeling of complex systems. Via a case study on the challenging problem of river water quality modeling, we show that the framework efficiently learns an interpretable model, with higher modeling accuracy than existing methods.

The ocean is filled with microscopic microalgae called phytoplankton, which together are responsible for as much photosynthesis as all plants on land combined. Our ability to predict their response to the warming ocean relies on understanding how the dynamics of phytoplankton populations is influenced by changes in environmental conditions. One powerful technique to study the dynamics of phytoplankton is flow cytometry, which measures the optical properties of thousands of individual cells per second. Today, oceanographers are able to collect flow cytometry data in real-time onboard a moving ship, providing them with fine-scale resolution of the distribution of phytoplankton across thousands of kilometers. One of the current challenges is to understand how these small and large scale variations relate to environmental conditions, such as nutrient availability, temperature, light and ocean currents. In this paper, we propose a novel sparse mixture of multivariate regressions model to estimate the time-varying phytoplankton subpopulations while simultaneously identifying the specific environmental covariates that are predictive of the observed changes to these subpopulations. We demonstrate the usefulness and interpretability of the approach using both synthetic data and real observations collected on an oceanographic cruise conducted in the north-east Pacific in the spring of 2017.

We propose a generative model for the spatio-temporal distribution of high dimensional categorical observations. These are commonly produced by robots equipped with an imaging sensor such as a camera, paired with an image classifier, potentially producing observations over thousands of categories. The proposed approach combines the use of Dirichlet distributions to model sparse co-occurrence relations between the observed categories using a latent variable, and Gaussian processes to model the latent variable's spatio-temporal distribution. Experiments in this paper show that the resulting model is able to efficiently and accurately approximate the temporal distribution of high dimensional categorical measurements such as taxonomic observations of microscopic organisms in the ocean, even in unobserved (held out) locations, far from other samples. This work's primary motivation is to enable deployment of informative path planning techniques over high dimensional categorical fields, which until now have been limited to scalar or low dimensional vector observations.

Scientists mimicked the neural networks of the brain to map phytoplankton types in the Mediterranean Sea. A new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans presented a new method of classifying phytoplankton that relies on artificial intelligence clustering. Phytoplankton blanket surface waters of the world's oceans, and pigments in their cells absorb certain wavelengths of light, like the chlorophyll that gives plants their green color. In the Mediterranean Sea, where the latest study focused its efforts, an array of phytoplankton species bloom throughout the year. Past research has mined satellite images of ocean color in the Mediterranean for common pigments found in phytoplankton.

Do you like a planet that hasn't yet melted? Then you're secretly in love with plankton, tiny marine organisms that float around at the mercy of currents. They sequester carbon dioxide and provide two thirds of the oxygen in our atmosphere and sacrifice themselves as baby food for the young fish that eventually end up on your plate. Yet science knows little about the complex dynamics of plankton on ocean-wide scales. So researchers are asking the machines for help, developing clever robots that use AI to examine and classify plankton, the pivotal organisms at the base of our oceanic food chain.