Moscow. 22nd of June. INTERFAX.RU – A team of scientists and developers is creating a neural network algorithm for monitoring the ecosystem of Lake Baikal, Interfax was told by Yandex.Cloud on Tuesday.
“The algorithm will automatically analyze samples of Baikal water, recognize and classify the microorganisms contained in it. Such an analysis will facilitate the work of scientists who now have to distinguish more than 400 species of Baikal plankton and systematize the data manually. A working prototype of the system will be presented this summer,” said the representative companies.
The neural network will be used in the project of ecological monitoring of Lake Baikal “Point No. 1”, which has been continuously implemented since 1945.
Specialists from the Research Institute of Biology of Irkutsk State University (Research Institute of Biology, Irkutsk State University), developers of artificial intelligence models for studying marine ecosystems Maritime AI, the team of the Yandex.Cloud cloud platform and the Lake Baikal Foundation for the Support of Applied Environmental Research and Development are working on its creation.
To train the algorithm, Irkutsk scientists provided more than 1,000 images of each plankton species. Based on them, the Maritime AI team will create a classification mechanism for plankton species using Yandex DataSphere, a Yandex.Cloud service for data analysis, development and operation of machine learning models. Images of microorganisms will be transmitted to Yandex.Cloud directly from the microscopes of the laboratory of the Research Institute of Biology, Irkutsk State University, and the algorithm will automatically determine the species of plankton particles.
It is assumed that the algorithm will detect up to 99% of all types of plankton, and specialists from the Institute of Biology will monitor the quality of its work.
“This is a project of cooperation between Irkutsk State University and Yandex. This is very important. And quite rarely, such companies start to cooperate with regional universities,” Maxim Timofeev, director of the Institute of Biology at Irkutsk State University, told Interfax.
The “Point No. 1” project is being carried out at one point of Lake Baikal near the village of Bolshiye Koty – water samples are taken weekly 2.7 km from the coast at a depth of 800 m. Scientists measure key indicators of the state of water, phyto- and zooplankton. Over the years, more than 5 million records have been accumulated, representing valuable information about the state of Lake Baikal. Based on these data, one can judge about the occurred and ongoing changes in the ecosystem of the lake.
“Point No. 1” is included in the Russian Book of Records as the longest project of regular environmental monitoring in the history of science. It was initiated by the famous scientist, Baikalist, Professor Mikhail Kozhov. Currently, the project is financed by the Lake Baikal Foundation for the Support of Applied Environmental Research and Development.
Irkutsk State University was founded in 1918 and is the oldest university in Eastern Siberia. Currently, the educational complex of the university includes eight educational institutes, eight faculties, one branch and a scientific library. Its structure includes 13 scientific departments, including four research institutes: Research Institute of Applied Physics, Research Institute of Biology, Research Institute of Petroleum and Coal Chemical Synthesis, Research Institute of Legal Protection of Baikal, as well as an astronomical observatory and a botanical garden.
