Population model of the recent subtidal invasion of Sargassum muticum in southern Portugal

Dissertação de Mestrado, Biologia Marinha, Especialização em Ecologia e Conservação, Faculdade de Ciências do Mar e do Ambiente, Universidade do Algarve, 2007

Towards a hydrodynamic operational model of the Algarve coast and St. Vincent Cape

This study attempts to implement a hydrodynamic operational model which can ultimately be used for projecting oil spill dispersal patterns and also sewage, pollution and can also be used in wave forecasting. A two layer nested model was created using MOHID Water, which is powerful ocean modelling software. The first layer (father) is used to impose the boundary conditions for the second layer (son). This was repeated for two different wind dominant regimes, Easterly and Westerly winds respectively. A qualitative comparison was done between measured tidal data and the tidal output. Sea surface temperature was also qualitatively compared with the model’s results. The results from both simulations were analysed and compared to historical literature. The comparison was done at the surface layer, 100 metre depth and at 800m depth. In the surface layer the first simulation generated an upwelling event near Cape St. Vincent and within the Algarve. The second simulation generated a non-upwelling event within which the surface was flow reversed and the warm water mass was along the Algarve coastline and evening turning clockwise around Cape St. Vincent. At the 100 metre depth for both simulations, velocity vortexes were observed near Cape St. Vincent travelling northerly and southerly at various instances. At 800metre depth a strong oceanic flow was observed moving north westerly along the continental shelf.

BIMP: A real-time biological model of multi-scale keypoint detection in V1

We present an improved, biologically inspired and multiscale keypoint operator. Models of single- and double-stopped hypercomplex cells in area V1 of the mammalian visual cortex are used to detect stable points of high complexity at multiple scales. Keypoints represent line and edge crossings, junctions and terminations at fine scales, and blobs at coarse scales. They are detected by applying first and second derivatives to responses of complex cells in combination with two inhibition schemes to suppress responses along lines and edges. A number of optimisations make our new algorithm much faster than previous biologically inspired models, achieving real-time performance on modern GPUs and competitive speeds on CPUs. In this paper we show that the keypoints exhibit state-of-the-art repeatability in standardised benchmarks, often yielding best-in-class performance. This makes them interesting both in biological models and as a useful detector in practice. We also show that keypoints can be used as a data selection step, significantly reducing the complexity in state-of-the-art object categorisation. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Ecologic zonation model of the benthic foraminifera and thecamoebians of Guadiana river estuary and application in paleoenvironmental reconstruction

Tese de doutoramento, Ciências do Mar ( Processos de Ecossistemas Marinhos), Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade do Algarve, 2012