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Jake is a postdoctoral researcher dedicated to exploring the health of marine ecosystems through the lens of marine predator ‘sentinel’ species. He works across the Marine Mammal Research Program (MMRP) and Elizabeth Madin Macroecology Laboratory to advance megafauna abundance monitoring using satellite imagery. By integrating satellite-based whale, seal, and turtle counts with behavioral and environmental data, he is working to develop cost-effective methodologies to monitor large-bodied marine mammal sentinel populations in remote regions.
Find Jake on Google Scholar and ORCID:
Dr. Jake Linksy
Jake's Research Aims
Jake’s research broadly examines how the environment shapes marine predator life history and foraging strategies, and how these sentinel species may allow us to better understand the impacts of environmental change on marine ecosystems.
His work addresses two primary questions:
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How do changes in the marine environment influence the physiology, behavior, and ultimately, population health of marine predators
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How have these adaptations led to species success among prey distributions and ocean conditions in the past, and how does this bode for the future of modern predators?
Jake’s postdoctoral research specifically focuses on question #1 by developing new methodologies to monitor the abundance of marine sentinel species using satellite imagery. This project aims to contribute to Artificial Intelligence applications for the detection of whales in satellite imagery. This information will be used to model population abundance for humpback whales in Hawaiian waters. This project advances AI-based detection of whales, pinnipeds, and turtles in very-high-resolution satellite data and uses these detections to model population abundance in Hawaiian waters. The results will inform management of protected species in U.S. waters and, more broadly, provide scalable tools for tracking marine ecosystem status through the health of sentinel populations.
Biography
Jake grew up in San Diego, where he split time between school and recreating in the species-rich coastal waters of southern California. He completed his undergraduate degree in philosophy at the University of California Santa Cruz, where he began working with marine mammals as an animal trainer and research assistant at the Long Marine Laboratory. In 2020, Jake moved to Brisbane, Australia, for his PhD at the University of Queensland, where he measured the health of migratory humpback whales from Minjerribah. Jake joined the MMRP in late 2024, where he currently conducts his postdoctoral research, and continues to enjoy time in the ocean in the Hawaiian Islands.