Health prediction for king salmon via evolutionary machine learning with genetic programming.

King (Chinook) salmon is the only salmon species farmed in Aotearoa New Zealand and accounts for over half of the world's production of king salmon. Determining the health status of king salmon effectively is important for farming. However, it is a challenging task due to the complex biotic and abiotic factors that influence health.

Quantifying the probability of a successful marine bioinvasion due to source-destination risk factors.

The increasing spread of marine non-indigenous species (NIS) due to the growth in global shipping traffic is causing widespread concern for the ecological and economic impacts of marine bioinvasions. Risk management authorities need tools to identify pathways and source regions of priority concern to better target efforts for preventing NIS introduction. The probability of a successful NIS introduction is affected by the likelihood that a marine species entrained in a transport vector will survive the voyage between origin and destination locations and establish an independently reproducing population at the destination.

Pest Alert Tool-a web-based application for flagging species of concern in metabarcoding datasets.

Advances in high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies and their increasing affordability have fueled environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding data generation from freshwater, marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Research institutions worldwide progressively employ HTS for biodiversity assessments, new species discovery and ecological trend monitoring. Moreover, even non-scientists can now collect an eDNA sample, send it to a specialized laboratory for analysis and receive in-depth biodiversity record from a sampling site.

Cryopreservation of six Symbiodiniaceae genera and assessment of fatty acid profiles in response to increased salinity treatments.

Symbiodiniaceae are a diverse group of dinoflagellates, the majority of which are free-living and/or associated with a variety of protists and other invertebrate hosts. Maintenance of isolated cultures is labour-intensive and expensive, and cryopreservation provides an excellent avenue for their long-term storage. We aimed to cryopreserve 15 cultured isolates from six Symbiodiniaceae genera using dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) as the cryoprotectant agent (CPA).

An open-source geospatial framework for beach litter monitoring.

Here, we present a framework for a beach litter monitoring process, based on free and open-source software (FOSS), which allows customization for any sampling design. The framework was developed by means of a GIS project (QGIS), a GIS collector (QField), and an R code, allowing further adjustments according to the area to be surveyed and research questions. The aim is to improve data collection, accessibility, and interoperability, as well as to help to fill the currently existing gap between fieldwork and data analysis, preventing typos and allowing better data processing.