Researchers in Hawaiʻi utilize amateur fish enthusiasts to tally deep-sea bottomfish populations
The Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center has launched a new citizen science initiative called OceanEYEs, aiming to recruit volunteers to identify Deep 7 deep-sea fish in underwater videos. This project, developed by a student in the Young Scientist Opportunity program and scientists, in partnership with Zooniverse.org, is a user-friendly web page that allows citizen scientists to help review images from the annual bottomfish survey, tagging and identifying all the fish they see.
The focus of the survey is on the "Deep 7" bottomfish, a group of seven species of fish that have both economic and cultural value to the islands. The data collected via OceanEYEs is included in the Citizen Science & Crowdsourcing Information Collection page's OMB Control Number, contributing to the Deep 7 stock assessment. This data is used to provide managers with the best information to make management decisions, including annual commercial fishery catch limits.
Fifteen different people view and annotate each image on OceanEYEs, resulting in a "consensus" annotation. This collaborative approach significantly enhances NOAA's capabilities to process image data from the Pacific Islands region. Initial results suggest that consensus annotations from OceanEYEs match the accuracy of professional analysts.
The OceanEYEs web page provides a tutorial on how to recognise each fish species and how to properly mark them in the image. It also includes a field guide and text to help users identify and annotate fish, as well as information about the science behind the project. The camera systems record hundreds of thousands of images over the course of the survey, which can quickly overwhelm NOAA scientists. By involving citizen scientists, the workload is distributed, allowing NOAA to focus on the analysis of the data collected.
NOAA has been investing heavily in the development of AI solutions to help analyse images, but requires large numbers of training images to learn. The images collected and annotated via OceanEYEs can be used to train these AI systems, further enhancing NOAA's ability to process and analyse data efficiently.
Users are encouraged to log on, dive in, and start exploring the underwater world while helping assess Hawaii's bottomfish populations through OceanEYEs. A video tutorial is available on the Zooniverse-hosted OceanEYEs web page to guide users in annotating fish.
The development of the future citizen science initiative OceanEYEs is led by a collaborative group of scientists and organizations specialized in marine biodiversity and conservation; however, the exact responsible person or organization is not explicitly named in the provided search results. The OceanEYEs project collects data that is authorized and helps inform management decisions for bottomfish in the Pacific Islands.
Join OceanEYEs today and contribute to the conservation of Hawaii's valuable deep-sea fish populations. Your help is crucial in making informed management decisions and ensuring the sustainability of these important species for future generations.
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