Thomas Siderius
Portland State University, OR·Engineering
As the climate changes, ocean animals from tiny plankton to whales are shifting where they live and how many there are. Tracking these shifts is hard.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
passive acoustics
underwater acoustics
soundscape
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2027
What they work on
- Adapt a low-cost, open-source drifting logger that is weighted to follow a set water density. The goal is to sample a target ocean depth while carrying more sensors than existing drifters.
- Develop compact, low-power sensors that detect environmental DNA (genetic traces left in the water) from specific species of seals, fish and copepods directly on the drifter.
- Develop directional soundscape processing, using hydrophone arrays and machine learning, to locate individual calling seals and estimate seal density and distribution.
- Test whether combining seal calls with eDNA detections and data such as temperature and oxygen estimates food web abundance over time and space better than any single data stream.
More about the research
Animals are spread through a huge, three-dimensional ocean, and most survey tools are expensive. This project builds low-cost drifting instruments that act as underwater "ears" and "noses." They listen for the sounds animals make and sample the DNA they leave behind, so scientists can track several parts of a coastal food web at once.
Why it matters
Cheap, drifting sensor networks that combine sound and environmental DNA could give ocean scientists and resource managers better information on where seals, fish and plankton are, and how many. That could help track how coastal food webs respond to a changing climate, with less disturbance to marine life than traditional surveys.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Emmanouil Tentzeris
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Engineering
Adapt a low-cost, open-source drifting logger that is ballasted to follow a target water density, overcoming the cost and payload limits of existing autonomous ocean observing platforms.
Leigh Torres
Oregon State University, OR·Ecology & Evolution
Test how temperature affects krill (Nyctiphanes australis) metabolic rate, energy requirements and body condition through controlled experiments measuring bioenergetic and biochemical responses.
Erin Meyer-Gutbrod
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether North Atlantic right whales leave or stay at feeding sites based on measurable prey-density thresholds, using an individual movement model built from repeated sightings of identified whales.
The school
Portland State University: 3 labs on PI Pages, $52M a year on research, 92 research doctorates a year.
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