Doctoral student Shirah Strock will travel from the Virginia Coast Reserve (VCR) LTER to the Santa Barbara Coastal (SBC) LTER. She will receive hands-on training in ViQi, an AI platform used to quantify sessile organism (algae, invertebrate) recruitment from long-term benthic imagery. Working with SBC researchers, she will learn how expert-validated annotated datasets are used to train AI algorithms for organism identification and enumeration. She will also participate in field imaging and assist with image-processing workflows.
Returning to the Virginia Coast Reserve, she will develop a standardized ViQi workflow to analyze long-term recruitment patterns on oyster reefs. Adopting ViQi will accelerate annotation and boost efficiency and consistency in data collection at VCR. Employing these methods will improve Shira’s dissertation research, enhance VCR science, and provide a transferable workflow for computer-vision analysis across LTER sites.
Shirah Strock is a first year PhD student at the University of Virginia working with Dr. Max Castorani. She is broadly interested in recruitment dynamics in systems shaped by foundation species, particularly algal recruitment in systems dominated by marine macrophytes. She is currently studying algal recruitment in kelp forest ecosystems and plans to also examine recruitment dynamics within the seagrass meadows of the Virginia Coast Reserve LTER. Her broader goal is to advance our scientific understanding of a cryptic process that is fundamental to population and community ecology.
