Abstract

Modeling marine larval behavior using enhanced technologies
Track: Ocean, Coastal, and Marine Resources
Authors: Tiffany Vance, Kyle Wilcox, Melanie Schroeder, C.J. Beegle-Krause

LarvaMap is a tool to allow researchers and managers to run larval transport scenarios. It has been re-designed with a web-based interface, runs on the Amazon cloud and can be accessed at http://services.asascience.com/MapApp/larvamap/

The three main parts of LarvaMap are a larval behavior toolbox, a Lagrangian particle model, and a web-system for running the transport models. The behavior toolbox allows researchers to design a suite of behaviors (e.g. vertical migration) specific to an organism. An open-source particle transport model was written in python to support LarvaMap. Circulation model output drives the larva transport. Any circulation model available via the DAP protocol (pydap, Hyrax, THREDDS) can be used.

Model outputs include particle trajectories in common formats [i.e. netCDF-CF (trajectories) and ESRI Shapefile], a web accessible geojson representation of the particle centroid trajectory, and a stochastic GeoTIFF representation of the probabilities associated with a collection of modeling runs.