Date of Award

5-2016

Thesis Date

5-2016

Degree Type

Honors Thesis-Unrestricted

Degree Name

B.S.

Department

Computer Science

Degree Program

Computer Science

Director

Mahdi Abdelguerfi

Abstract

Tracking an individual specimen can be a difficult task especially when one also has to keep track of the environmental factors that affect the tracked specimen’s behavior. The task of tracking these animals becomes impossible when they become submerged in water and their number increases to more than just one. The aquatic species that are being tracked by this project in Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico are: tarpon, scalloped hammerhead, whale shark, tiger shark, yellowfin tuna, spotted seatrout, redfish, and bull shark. We are tracking these fish using acoustic and satellite transmitters. The insertion of transmitters in the fish was handled by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries biologists. The acoustic transmitters were implanted on smaller fish that only swam in Lake Pontchartrain. Due to this, receivers were only implanted at locations across the lake on various types of attachments such as buoys, PVC pipes, and pilings. These receivers were positioned at more than ninety locations in order to maximize the acquisition of detections. These species were tracked in Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico. After this preliminary setup, a constant batch of data was generated on a regular basis and this data was process by the application developed in this project. A Ruby on Rails application was then setup in order to store this data and manipulate it to display an animated track. The application utilizes: Ruby, Rails, HTML, CSS, SQL, JavaScript and multiple third part libraries. Many optimizations were performed in order to ensure reliability and performance when loading a high volume of fish or if a high volume of users were to use the application.

Rights

The University of New Orleans and its agents retain the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible this honors thesis in whole or part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The author retains all other ownership rights to the copyright of the honors thesis.

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