Aylin Akkaya, Tim Awbery, Patrick Lyne, Giulia Cipriano, Rosalia Maglietta, Vito Reno, Carmelo Fanizza, Roberto Carlucci
Sperm whales Physeter macrocephalus show a steady population decline, yet despite their threatened status, there remains a dearth of knowledge in the Mediterranean Sea. The current study reports the preliminary results of sperm whales' acoustic patterns within the Gulf of Taranto and the Northwestern Levantine Sea. "Regular" clicks were recorded in both regions indicating the presence of foraging grounds. "Codas" were also present in the Northwestern Levantine. The presence of codas and social units emphasises the importance of the North-western Levantine as potential nursery grounds....
Pasquale Ricci, Maurizio Ingrosso, Roberto Carlucci, Carmelo Fanizza, Rosalia Maglietta, Cornelia Santacesaria, Angelo Tursi, Giulia Cipriano
The dolphins fishery competition in the Gulf of Taranto (Northern Ionian Sea, Central Mediterranean Sea) was investigated during the period 2009 2016. In particular, the biomass removal by the striped and common bottlenose dolphin and the local fishery was estimated by means the food consumption rates of dolphins and landing data of the main fishing gears operating in the area. In addition, an indication on the overlap, in terms of diet/ landing composit ion, occurring between both dolphin species and fishery was discussed.
Enrico Petritoli, Fabio Leccese
In this paper the idea to develop an underwater drone optimized for shallow water, inland ports and small inlets is shown. The vehicle should be simple and robust: a mathematical part is included on the vertical balance to be able to size weights and payload volumes.
Marc Le Menn, Steffen Morvan, André Lusven
Doppler current profilers are used in oceanography to measure oceanic circulation, but also in hydrology to calculate the flow of rivers. They allow the retrieval of water masses profiles in terms of velocity and direction. Direction is obtained via an electronic compass and tilt sensors, while velocity is obtained by measuring Doppler pulses shifts back scattered by particles located in water cells allocated along the instrument's measurement range. For current-meters and low range current profilers, calibrations are possible in towing tanks. But, these calibrations are limited in maximum...
Giuseppe Schirripa Spagnolo, Lorenzo Cozzella, Fabio Leccese
Acoustic, radio frequency (RF) and optical waves systems are the technologies that are used to carry out underwater wireless communications. In scientific, military and industrial sectors, the development of robust and efficient submarine wireless communication links is of enormous interest. To achieve secure short-range wireless communications, the Underwater Optical Wireless Communication (UOWC), which uses the 450-550 nm spectral range of the electromagnetic spectrum, is a good technology. Recently, UOWC applications have been proposed for environmental monitoring, offshore exploration,...
Pasquale Ricci, Maurizio Ingrosso, Giulia Cipriano, Carmelo Fanizza, Rosalia Maglietta, Vito Renò, Angelo Tursi, Roberto Carlucci
An investigation of the marine food web in the Gulf of Taranto (Northern Ionian Sea, Central Mediterranean Sea) was carried out to explore the top down cascading effects driven by the Odontocetes. The food web was analysed by a mass balance model using 51 functional groups and detailing the trophic impacts of the striped and common bottlenose dolphins, the Risso's dolphin and the sperm whale during the period 2010 2014. Odontocetes resulted top predators with the highest TL estimated for the Risso's dolphin (TL=5.40) and the lowest for the common bottlenose dolphin (TL=4.47). The striped...
Gianvito Losapio, Rosalia Maglietta, Tiziano Politi, Ettore Stella, Carmelo Fanizza, Karin Hartman, Roberto Carlucci, Giovanni Dimauro, Vito Renò
The study of cetaceans is of vital importance to infer biological information useful to drive sustainable action plans aimed at preserving the marine environment and its biodiversity. In a recent study, we developed a novel algorithm for the detection of dorsal fins in the context of a fully automated pipeline for the photo-identification of Risso's dolphins. A lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture was proposed to recognize fins among cropped images, filtering the inputs for the photo-identification algorithm. In this paper, we compare the performances of that custom...
Rosalia Maglietta, Vito Renò, Rocco Caccioppoli, Stefano Bellomo, Francesca Cornelia Santacesaria, Giulia Cipriano, Ettore Stella, Karin Hartman, Carmelo Fanizza, Giovanni Dimauro, Roberto Carlucci
Photo-identification is designed to recognize single individuals of a species by exploiting unique and distinctive marks identifiable in one or multiple photographs. The Risso's dolphin's distinctive marks and scars on the dorsal fin proved to be very useful to photoidentify individuals. The aim of this paper is to improve the performances of the photo-identification studies on this species through machine learning techniques. This paper proposes the introduction of NNpool, based on Convolutional Neural Networks, in the SPIR pipeline to identify Risso's dolphins in a new photograph.
Damiano Alizzio, Marco Bonfanti, Nicola Donato, Carla Lucia Faraci, Giovanni Maria Grasso, Fabio Raffaele Emilio Lo Savio, Roberto Montanini, Antonino Quattrocchi
The present work is a part of a larger project relative to design of an instrumented spar buoy within the multi purpose "Lab on Sea" unit equipped with an energy harvesting system for use in marine applications. Such a system wil l be based on deformable bands integral to the unit to convert the wave motion energy into electricity through piezo patch transducers. In this paper, a "fixed point" spar buoy scale model suitable for tests in a controlled ripples type wave motion channel was designed, built and tested. The purpose of this model is to verify that it remains fixed maximizing, then,...
Gabriele Nardone, Saverio Devoti, Arianna Orasi, Luca Parlagreco, Marco Picone
The aim of this study is a preliminary analysis and comparison of a ten years, multi sensor co-located observations of sea level. Starting from data collected by the Italian tide gauge network, we report the description of recurring errors, some statistics for the compared signals and a comparison between closed stations.