Project material

CoExist is a co-operation project between Finland and Russia that focuses on the coexistence of freshwater seals and humans. Other partners of the CoExist project lead by the University of Eastern Finland are Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finnish Association for Nature Conservation and Biologists for Nature Conservation in St. Petersburg. The project was implemented under the European Neighbourhood Instrument (ENI) and co-financed by the European Union (EU).

The project produces a wide variety of information of the Saimaa and Ladoga ringed seals for environmental education purposes as well as for different stakeholders and authorities to support decision-making. The material published in the project can be found on this page.

Project summary

Project result leaflet (BFNC)
Roll-up (UEF)

Communications and environmental education

Early childhood education and comprehensive education

Saimaa ringed seal themed exercise (FANC), in Finnish:

Comprehensive education grades 7-9 and upper secondary- and vocational education

Photo identification of the seals

Nepovinnykh E., Eerola T., Biard V., Mutka P., Niemi M., Kunnasranta M., Kälviäinen H. 2022. SealID: Saimaa Ringed SealRe-Identification Dataset. Sensors 2022, 22, 7602. https://doi.org/10.3390/s22197602
Niemi M., Nykänen M., Biard V., Kurkilahti M., Kunnasranta M. 2022. Molting phenology of a lacustrine ringed seal, Pusa hispida saimensis. Ecology and Evolution, 12, e9248. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.9248
Nepovinnykh, E., Chelak, I., Lushpanov, A., Eerola, T., Kälviäinen, H., & Chirkova, O. (2022). Matching individual Ladoga ringed seals across short-term image sequences. Mammalian Biology.
Biard, V., Nykänen, M., Niemi, N., Kunnasranta, M. (2022): Extreme moulting site fidelity of the Saimaa ringed seal. Mammalian Biology. DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s42991-021-00209-z
Nepovinnykh, E., Eerola, T., Kalviainen, H. (2020): Siamese Network Based Pelage Pattern Matching for Ringed Seal Re-identificationThe IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) Workshops, 2020, pp. 25-34. (LUT)
Lushpanov, A. (2020) Instance segmentation of Ladoga ringed seals. Master’s thesis. LUT University. (LUT)
Zavialkin, D. (2020) CNN-based ringed seal pelage pattern extraction. Master’s thesis. LUT University. (LUT)
Kauppala, J. (2020) Finding interesting images from large quantities of camera trap data. Bachelor´s thesis. LUT University (LUT)
Alemu, Y. (2020) Seal pose estimation using convolutional neural networks. Master’s thesis. LUT University. (LUT)
Ola, B. B. M. (2021). Metric learning based pattern matching for species agnostic animal re-identification. Master’s thesis LUT University (LUT)

Fishing

Literature Review on Fishing Techniques (BFNC) FIN RUS
Trukhanova I. S., Andrievskaya E. M., and Alekseev V. A. (2021) Bycatch in Lake Ladoga Fisheries Remains a Threat to Ladoga Ringed Seal (Pusa hispida ladogensis) Population. Aquatic Mammals 2021, 47(5), 470-481. DOI 10.1578/AM.47.5.2021.470

Seal-friendly fishing on Lake Saimaa: Trawling (UEF), in Finnish/Russian:

Seal-friendly fishing on Lake Saimaa: Fish traps (UEF), in Finnish/Russian:

Seal-friendly fishing on Lake Saimaa: Recreational fishing (UEF), in Finnish/Russian:

How to build a seal-friendly small fish trap (FANC), in Finnish/Russian: