Publications by authors named "Claus Melvad"

Research, monitoring, and management of marine and aquatic ecosystems often require surface water samples to measure biogeochemical and optical parameters. Traditional sampling with a boat and several personnel onboard can be labor-intensive and safety requirements limit sampling activities in high-risk environments. This paper describes the Naval Operating Research Drone Assessing Climate Change (NORDACC).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Image-based methods for species identification offer cost-efficient solutions for biomonitoring. This is particularly relevant for invertebrate studies, where bulk samples often represent insurmountable workloads for sorting, identifying, and counting individual specimens. On the other hand, image-based classification using deep learning tools have strict requirements for the amount of training data, which is often a limiting factor.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Climate change is rapidly altering the Arctic environment. Although long-term environmental observations have been made at a few locations in the Arctic, the incomplete coverage from ground stations is a main limitation to observations in these remote areas. Here we present a wind and sun powered multi-purpose mobile observatory (ARC-MO) that enables near real time measurements of air, ice, land, rivers, and marine parameters in remote off-grid areas.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The rapid warming of our planet has resulted in accelerated melting of ice in polar regions. Currently we have limited knowledge on how, where and when the surface meltwater layer is mixed with the underlying ocean due to lack of observations in these remote areas. We present a lightweight (17 kg) and low-cost (6000€) instrument for autonomous profiling across the strongly stratified upper layer in Arctic coastal waters, freshened by the riverine input and meltwater from glaciers, icebergs, and sea ice.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Accelerated melting of ice in Polar Regions due to global warming increases freshwater input to coastal waters from marine terminating glaciers. Lack of measurements near the glacier terminus limits our knowledge of the mixing processes between freshwater and the underlying ocean. We present a low-cost (< € 3200) and lightweight (2.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Most animal species on Earth are insects, and recent reports suggest that their abundance is in drastic decline. Although these reports come from a wide range of insect taxa and regions, the evidence to assess the extent of the phenomenon is sparse. Insect populations are challenging to study, and most monitoring methods are labor intensive and inefficient.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Icebergs account for approximately half of the freshwater flux from the Greenland Ice Sheet and they can impact marine ecosystems by releasing nutrients and sediments into the ocean as they drift and melt. Parameterizing iceberg fluxes of nutrients and sediments to fjord and ocean waters remains a difficult task due to the complexity of ice-ocean interactions and is complicated by a lack of observations. Acquiring iceberg samples can be difficult and dangerous, as icebergs can break apart and roll without warning.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF