Colloquium Call For Abstracts
Graduate Program in Marine Biology
College of Charleston, Grice Marine Laboratory
Student Marine Biology Research Colloquium
September 28-29, 2012
Call For Abstracts
The Colloquium Committee is pleased to announce the Research Colloquium of the Graduate Program in Marine Biology (GPMB), to be held Friday and Saturday, September 28 and 29, 2012, in the auditorium of the Marine Resources Research Institute at the Fort Johnson campus.
The goals of the Colloquium are to:
- increase awareness of ongoing marine biological research by GPMB and MES students,
- give students experience with formal scientific presentations,
- introduce new graduate students to research opportunities in marine biology, and
- promote interaction among faculty and students.
All GPMB students (excluding incoming students) are expected to present their research (or proposed research) in the Colloquium. MES students conducting research in marine biology are also invited to participate. Priority for oral presentations will be given to Marine Biology students who have at least preliminary data to present, and all Marine Biology students are expected to give at least one oral presentation in the Colloquium before graduating. Presenters will be notified by the Colloquium Committee as to whether they have been chosen to give a talk or a poster by September 14, 2012.
Again this year, an award will be given for the best overall oral presentation. Presentations will be judged on the basis of: 1) scientific content based on the articulation of the problem, soundness of hypothesis testing, methodologies, and analyses; 2) oral and visual quality of the delivery; and 3) demonstration of confidence and depth of understanding of the material. The award will be presented at the Saturday evening social event.
- Deadline for Abstracts: September 7, 2012
Application instructions are below, and are also available on the Graduate Program in Marine Biology web site (http://www.cofc.edu/marine/colloquium.htm)
INSTRUCTIONS FOR ABSTRACTS (Due September 7, 2012 at 5pm)
Email your abstract , formatted as described below, as an attached file (Word document or plain text file), using the filename ‘yourlastname_abstract’ to Tim O'Donnell (odonnellcofc@gmail.com). In the text of the email, please answer the following questions:
1) What year are you in the GPMB program?
2) Have you given a talk at the Colloquium previously?
3) Have you presented a poster at the Colloquium previously?
If your abstract includes any special characters, symbols, or other text that might be lost in electronic transfer, it is strongly recommended that you either include a PDF version as a separate attachment, or deliver a hard copy to either Shelly Brew (for GPMB students) or Mark McConnel (for MES students); otherwise, hard copies are not necessary.
The title (all words bold and capitalized) should be followed by the authors’ names and affiliations (i.e., GPMB or MES, and your institutional affinity). The abstract must be 250 words or less. An example is provided below:
ON THE USE OF TEXTURE ANALYSIS AS A TOOL TO AUTOMATE
CALCULATION OF CORAL COVER FROM VIDEO TRANSECTS
Pante, E. (GPMB, College of Charleston) and Dustan, P. (College of Charleston)
The widespread degradation of coral reefs throughout the world urges the need of monitoring techniques on a global scale. While in situ monitoring programs accumulate high quality information on discrete areas and the use of satellite imagery is limited to shallow areas, automated calculation of coral cover may provide a cost and time effective way to assess changes in benthic communities on a large spatial scale. It
is hypothesized that texture analysis can contribute to the automated analysis of video transects. Texture is defined as the spatial relationship between the pixels of an image, and has been previously used in pattern recognition studies. Digital images from the USEPA Coral Reef Monitoring Project were used to run the texture analysis. TIFF images frame-grabbed from video transects were point-counted to provide a robust estimate of coral cover. Eleven measures of texture were then calculated using a 3 by 3 kernel, and a stepwise multiple regression model was used to determine the relationship between coral cover and texture measures. Coral cover and texture were positively correlated (whole image: n=20, F=4.177,adjusted R squared=0.54; green band: n=20, F=7.2, adjusted R squared=0.70; blue band: n=20, F=8.629, adjusted R squared=0.71; red band: n=20, F=10.75, adjusted R squared=0.72). Despite the enlightened
relationship between coral cover and texture, it remains challenging to automate coral cover calculation, mainly because of the amount of variation within images and transects. Current research directions include the use of larger kernels (larger in situ measures of variation), and tools of pattern recognition.