Future Recommendations

If beginning a deployment early, it is recommended to have the bait stored at home and defrosted overnight. This will reduce time spent at the university gaining access to the cold room, during the quiet time before staff and students arrive at the facilities. It also allows the bait to be properly defrosted which will facilitate the mashing up process on the boat. In case bait is stored at the university, a bucket can be filled with water from the port and the bait, stored inside several plastic bags to avoid leakage, can be defrosted on the journey out to the sampling sites.

The creation of a Moodle spreadsheet that indicates in real-time the availability of the vans and boat could be informative for individuals and research groups requiring the use of university vehicles. This would improve the flow of projects that depend on logistics and communication between several parties.

The sea conditions should also be monitored regularly including optimal tidal times so that deployments can benefit from the best visibility possible. Although the majority of the seabed off the coast of the Ancona region of the Adriatic is a sandy bottom, further research could be done to compare sites in the vicinity of rocky substrate to sites further away from the rocky substrate.

The lowest possible resolution for the videos is high definition (HD, 1040p), giving a total of nearly 130 GB for a field day with four deployments. Having additional SD cards and batteries allows a faster deployment process as the BRUVS can be put back into the water as soon as the boat has moved to a new sampling location. An external hard drive disk with plenty of space is also recommended and it should be protected in a shockproof case.

CoralCam is a low-cost adaptation to GoPro cameras which allows scheduled short duration recordings to be set once or twice a day so that the battery of the GoPros can last for several weeks instead of for a single deployment day (Greene, Forsman, Toonen and Donahue, 2020). Ideal for studies such as monitoring the growth rate of corals, it may be possible to set scheduled recordings to coincide with the peak foraging times of certain species, depending on the research subject.