Skip Navigation


ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil Advance Access originally published online on April 8, 2009
ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil 2009 66(6):1073-1080; doi:10.1093/icesjms/fsp060
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
66/6/1073    most recent
fsp060v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Fernandes, P. G.
PubMed
Right arrow Articles by Fernandes, P. G.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

Crown Copyright © 2009. Published by Oxford Journals on behalf of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. All rights reserved

This article appears in the following ICES Journal of Marine Science issue: The Ecosystem Approach with Fisheries Acoustics and Complementary Technologies [View the issue table of contents]

Classification trees for species identification of fish-school echotraces

Paul G. Fernandes

FRS Marine Laboratory, PO Box 101, 375 Victoria Road, Torry, Aberdeen AB11 9DB, Scotland, UK

tel: +44 1224 295403; fax: +44 1224 295511; e-mail fernandespg{at}marlab.ac.uk.

Fernandes, P. G. 2009. Classification trees for species identification of fish-school echotraces. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 66: 1073–1080.

Acoustic surveys provide valuable information on the abundance and distribution of many fish species, but are particularly effective for schooling pelagic fish of commercial importance. However, despite recent advances in multifrequency processing, the technique still requires some subjective judgement when allocating the acoustic data, fish-school echotraces, to particular species—the so-called "scrutiny process". This is assisted by "ground truth" trawling and operator experience of relating trawl data to echotraces of particular fish schools. In this paper, a method to identify species based on "classification trees" is applied to data from a component of the International North Sea Herring Acoustic Survey. Classification trees may be considered as a variant of decision trees, and have properties that are intuitive to biologists, because they are similar to the keys used for the biological identification of species. The method described here incorporates a multifrequency fish-school filter, image analysis to isolate fish-school echotraces, and finally, a classification-tree system using the multifrequency information from the ground-truthed echotraces that can be translated into a processing tool for objective species allocation. The classification-tree system is compared with the traditional method of expert-based scrutiny. Unlike the latter, however, a measure of uncertainty is attributed to the classification-tree approach and this could be propagated through the acoustic-survey estimation procedure as a component of the total uncertainty in the abundance estimate.

Keywords: acoustics, classification trees, fish, ground truth, herring, mackerel, multifrequency, species identification

Received 20 August 2008; accepted 2 January 2009; advance access publication 8 April 2009.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.