in this page: photoQuad | CIMPAL | cavetopo

In addition to scientific publications and technical reports, our Laboratory develops methodological tools and scientific software that are made available to the international scientific community.

photoQuad

photoQuad is a custom software for advanced image processing of photographic quadrat samples, dedicated to ecological applications. It is equipped with tools for automatic quadrat boundary detection, image calibration, image enhancement, multi-scale image segmentation, management of user-specific species libraries, random point counts, species counts, grid cell counts, estimation of absolute or relative-to-quadrat area and coverage, extraction of advanced 2D morphometric descriptors such as centroid or perimeter roughness, as well as several annotation, measurement or image metadata tools. These are functional in a layer-based environment, allowing the efficient processing of photoquadrat datasets.

photoQuad is free to download and use: www.mar.aegean.gr/sonarlab/photoquad

CIMPAL index

CIMPAL is an index, developed to estimate and map the cumulative impacts of invasive alien species on marine ecosystems. Cumulative impact scores are estimated on the basis of the distributions of invasive species and marine habitats, and both the reported magnitude of ecological impacts in the literature and the strength of such evidence. CIMPAL allows the identification of hotspots of highly impacted areas, and the prioritization of sites, pathways and species for management actions.

cavetopo

Marine cave ecological research is logistically challenging, as underwater mapping is performed in restricted spaces and with limited time or visibility. We have devised an easy-to-implement sampling method that facilitates the rapid 3D mapping of an underwater cave using a handheld echosounder and off-the-shelf, low-cost, materials. The developed scheme is reduces the logistics down to a few, easy to acquire, measurements, and shifts most of the complexity to the post-processing stage that is automatically performed by the cavetopo software. The rationale is to make things for the research diver as intuitive as possible, requiring only a few, easy-to-acquire measurements using a calibrated rope and a handheld echosounder. The cavetopo software produces the georeferenced 3D model without user intervention, providing a scaled representation of the surveyed cave.

cavetopo is distributed for free as supplementary material to the MEPS article: doi: 10.3354/meps10374