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Technological Developments

Instrumentation and technology developed at UASA for sargassum research

BioSarg app screen identifying an organism associated with sargassum
Android app

BioSarg · AI-assisted identification

Authors: G. Villarreal Brito, L. V. Monroy Velázquez and B. I. van Tussenbroek

The Reef Systems Academic Unit of the Institute of Marine Sciences and Limnology, UNAM, developed BioSarg, an Android application that uses artificial intelligence to support the identification of organisms associated with sargassum. From a photograph taken with a mobile phone, the system uses the DINOv2 model to turn the image into a numerical representation and compare it against a reference catalogue, showing the five most visually similar species.

70%of cases place the correct species
among the first five suggestions
43.8%with the previous model
107species in the catalogue

The catalogue gathers 71 mobile fauna species, 18 epibionts and 18 vertebrates, available in Spanish and English, with photographs, taxonomic classification and references.

Funded by Ciencia de Frontera · CBF2023-2024-1414

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Drift buoy floating at the surface, seen from the water
Instrumentation

Low-cost drift buoys

Authors: Gómez Reali, M.A., Escalante Mancera, J. E., López Portillo, H. J. A.

At UASA, drift buoys have been developed to track sargassum patches. They are released onto the floating mats and travel with them, recording their path out at sea.

GPStrajectory tracking
Cellularfor recovery
2 records/minstored on MicroSD

They also carry cameras to monitor the mobile fauna associated with sargassum.