Explore research activities in the Biodiversity Assessment and Tool Development theme related to freshwater ecosystems. Names shown indicate authors or co-authors involved from the Centre of Conservation and Restoration Science.
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Taxonomic & Functional Biodiversity Assessment
To assess biodiversity, taxonomic diversity, the “fingerprint” (who you are), and functional diversity, “the footprint” (what you do), are measured. Understanding the significance of the presence of a species, population, community, and the consequence of their loss is fundamental for the science and application of conservation and restoration.
Projects
Bringing River Biodiversity Assessment Into The 21st Century
The prevalence, sources and diversity of antibiotic resistant E. coli in Scottish surface waters: a baseline for risk assessment and intervention targets
Evaluating the landscape-scale benefits of sustainable urban drainage systems for freshwater biodiversity
Easter Beltie Ecological Restoration Monitoring Research
Quantifying Antimicobial Resistance in the River Almond Catchment Area
Online Plant Identification Training for Water of Leith Conservation Trust
Scotland-India Antimicrobial Resistance in the Environment Network (SIAMREN)
Methane-derived carbon in upland stream food webs
Gregarines - an aquatic symbiosis model system
Tarland & Beltie Burn Restoration
Publications
Fluctuating Habitats: Ecological Relevance of Environmental Variability and Predictability on Species, Communities, and Ecosystems (2022), Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution; (Fusi)
Pond ecology and conservation: research priorities and knowledge gaps (2021), Ecosphere; (Briers)
Best Practices for Monitoring and Assessing the Ecological Response to River Restoration (2021), Water; (Dodd)
Parasites, pathogens, and other symbionts of copepods (2021), Trends in Parasitology; (Rueckert)
Local contributions to beta-diversity in urban pond networks: implications for biodiversity conservation and management (2021), Diversity and Distributions; (Briers)
First genetic evidence that invasive bullhead (Cottus L. 1758) in Scotland is of English origin and the difficulty of resolving the European Cottus species taxonomy (2020), Journal of Fish Biology; (Rueckert)
Evolution: Parallel Paths to Parasitism in the Apicomplexa (2019), Current Biology; (Rueckert)
The symbiotic spectrum: where do the gregarines fit? (2019), Trends in Parasitology; (Rueckert)
The functional response and resilience in small waterbodies along land-use and environmental gradients (2018), Global Change Biology; (Briers)
Megasonic elution of waterborne protozoa enhances recovery rates (2018), Matters; (Kerrouche)
Community heterogeneity of aquatic macroinvertebrates in urban ponds at a multi-city scale (2018), Landscape Ecology; (Briers)
Animal Behaviour & Evolution
Animal Behaviour includes how animals move, interact with other organisms/species, and with their environment. Behaviour can be inherited as well as learned, and often increases an organism’s survival and reproduction. Behavioural adaptations can improve species’ resilience to changing environments.
Projects
Publications
A comment on 'The adaptive value of gluttony: predators mediate the life history trade-offs of satiation threshold' by Pruitt & Krauel (2010) (2021), Journal of Evolutionary Biology; (Holman)
Sexual selection can partly explain low frequencies of Segregation Distorter alleles (2021), Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences; (Holman)
Life stage-specific, stochastic environmental effects overlay density dependence in an Atlantic salmon population (2019), Ecology of Freshwater Fish; (Dodd)
Evolution of female choice under intralocus sexual conflict and genotype-by-environment interactions (2018), Philosophical Transactions B: Biological Sciences; (Holman)
Citizen Science
Citizen science is an approach that enables public participation and collaboration in scientific research and improves data coverage and knowledge sharing.
Projects
Online Plant Identification Training for Water of Leith Conservation Trust
Publications
Passive Acoustic Monitoring
Monitoring ecosystems through recording and analysing their sounds is a non-destructive way to gather information about the environment and the species which are present. Many species, from songbirds to fish and crabs, make sound and often use it for communication and finding a good place to live. Acoustic monitoring facilitates information gathering over large spatial and time scales, helping to assess changes in the biological and physical environment.
Projects
Easter Beltie Ecological Restoration Monitoring Research
Riparian noise and environmental quality in urban freshwater ecosystems
Publications
Remote Sensing
Remote sensing allows the collection of data form a distance, e.g. using drones or satellites. It is a powerful surveying tool, for example, to assess habitat change.
Projects
Publications
The Graphene Field Effect Transistor Modeling Based on an Optimized Ambipolar Virtual Source Model for DNA Detection (2021), Applied Sciences; (La Spada)
Towards the Development of Rapid and Low-Cost Pathogen Detection Systems Using Microfluidic Technology and Optical Image Processing (2020), Applied Sciences; (Kerrouche)
The geoengineering approach to the study of rivers and reservoirs (2019), Geological Society Special Publications; (Barreto Gonzales)
A test of the cumulative effect of river weirs on downstream migration success, speed and mortality of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) smolts: An empirical study (2019), Ecology of Freshwater Fish; (Dodd)
Smart Technologies
‘Smart’ in smart technologies stands for ‘Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology’. For example, a smart robot is an artificial intelligence system that learns from its surrounding and ‘evolves’ through learning and knowledge. Smart robots can help monitor the environment and animal behaviour.
Projects
Subjective orientation in VR audio
Towards Guided Self-Organisation in Artificial Complex Systems: A Swarm Robotics Case Study
Designing a smart system for pathogens detection in bathing waters
Autonomous Robot Evolution: Cradle to Grave
Publications
A Quality-Diversity Approach to Evolving a Repertoire of Diverse Behaviour-Trees in Robot Swarms (2023), ; (Hart)
Augmenting Novelty Search with a Surrogate Model to Engineer Meta-Diversity in Ensembles of Classifiers (2022), Applications of Evolutionary Computation: EvoApplications; (Hart)
Lifelong Learning Machines: Towards Developing Optimisation Systems That Continually Learn (2022), ; (Hart)
Artificial evolution of robot bodies and control: on the interaction between evolution, individual and cultural learning (2022), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences; (Hart, Le Goff)
Morpho-evolution with learning using a controller archive as an inheritance mechanism (2022), IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems; (Le Goff, Hart)
Towards Autonomous Robot Evolution (2021), ; (Hart)
Evolution of Diverse, Manufacturable Robot Body Plans (2020), ; (Hart, Le Goff)
Bootstrapping artificial evolution to design robots for autonomous fabrication (2020), Robotics; (Le Goff, Hart)
On Pros and Cons of Evolving Topologies with Novelty Search (2020), ; (Hart, Le Goff)
Sample and time efficient policy learning with CMA-ES and Bayesian Optimisation (2020), ; (Hart, Le Goff)
Comparing encodings for performance and phenotypic exploration in evolving modular robots (2019), ; (Hart)
The ARE Robot Fabricator: How to (Re)produce Robots that Can Evolve in the Real World (2019), ; (Hart)
Evolution of a Functionally Diverse Swarm via a Novel Decentralised Quality-Diversity Algorithm (2018), ; (Hart)
Environmental Informatics
Environmental informatics is the field of research and system development focusing on the collection, processing, management and sharing of environmental data and information (using e.g., artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, statistical codes etc).
Projects
Easter Beltie Ecological Restoration Monitoring Research
Publications
Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation for Holistic Counting under Label Gap (2021), Journal of Imaging; (Giuffrida)
A Neural Approach to Generation of Constructive Heuristics (2021), ; (Hart)
On the challenges of jointly optimising robot morphology and control using a hierarchical optimisation scheme (2021), ; (Le Goff, Hart)
Using novelty search to explicitly create diversity in ensembles of classifiers (2021), ; (Hart)
Same data, different conclusions: Radical dispersion in empirical results when independent analysts operationalize and test the same hypothesis (2021), Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes; (Briers)
From theory to practice in pattern-oriented modelling: identifying and using empirical patterns in predictive models (2021), Biological Reviews; (White)
WILDA: Wide Learning of Diverse Architectures for Classification of Large Datasets (2021), ; (Hart)
Understanding Deep Neural Networks For Regression In Leaf Counting (2020), ; (Giuffrida)
cde - R package to retrieve data from the Environment Agency Catchment Data Explorer site (2019), Journal of Open Source Software; (Briers)
Algorithm selection using deep learning without feature extraction (2019), ; (Hart)
An Illumination Algorithm Approach to Solving the Micro-Depot Routing Problem (2019), ; (Hart)
A novel similarity-based mutant vector generation strategy for differential evolution (2018), Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference; (Hart)