Investigating data-driven approaches to understand the interaction between water quality and physiological response of sentinel oysters in natural environment

Abstract The research presented in this paper was conducted as part of a project that aimed at using biosensors on sentinel oysters to provide a biological perspective of environmental changes. The physiological response patterns (e.g. heart rate variability, shell gape) of sentinel oysters can provide valuable insight into their exposure to environmental stressors. Sensors were attached to measure both heart rate and shell gape (physiological behaviour) of oysters placed at different depths in the water column. Sensors were also deployed to measure water quality that represents the environmental condition the oysters were in. The objective of this study is to utilise the data from different sensors to investigate how environmental conditions modulate physiological response of oysters. We have utilised a set of machine learning models to develop data-driven approaches that can predict heart rate and shell gape (opening and closing action) of oysters from water quality variables, and vice-versa. The level of prediction accuracy indicates how well environmental conditions influence the physiological response of oysters. The effectiveness of the developed approaches is evaluated using data collected from two different deployments of sensors in South East Tasmania, Australia. Experimental results demonstrate that the presented data-driven approaches can provide accurate predictions of physiological and water quality variables, for the data set considered in this study. The prediction error (in terms of MAPE) for HR and water quality is in the range of 3.17%-8.21% and 0.72%–2.48%, respectively, and classification accuracy (F-Score) for shell gape varies between 0.96 and 0.99.