Over its first two years of operations, NEPTUNE Canada has recorded thousands of hours of video, both during installation dives and from underwater cameras installed across its subsea network. All this video needs to be studied, but the organization’s software is not yet sophisticated enough to automatically identify a wide variety of animals and other features. By playing Digital Fishers, citizen scientists help researchers gather data from video, and unveil the mechanisms shaping the animal communities inhabiting the deep.
NEPTUNE Canada and the University of Victoria’s Centre for Global Studies (CFGS) developed Digital Fishers with help from $1 million in funding from CANARIE, Canada's Advanced Research and Innovation Network.
Digital Fishers
Looking for a few hundred thousand citizen scientists to help analyze 15-second deep-sea videos
Project Details
- Principal Scientist: Rod Dobell, Senior Research Associate
- Scientist Affiliation: University of Victoria’s Centre for Global Studies
- Dates: Ongoing
- PROJECT TYPE: Observation
- COST: Free
- GRADE LEVEL: All Ages
- TIME COMMITMENT: Variable
- HOW TO JOIN:
To participate, visit the Digital Fishers Web site, sign up and watch a short 15-second segment of video. As you view various animals and your surroundings, you can describe what you see by selecting from the fields below the video screen. These fields include: sea life, water clarity, seafloor composition, and any other objects you see (natural or human made). There is also a comment field where you can add more information. Your “annotation” then gets attached to that segment back at the NEPTUNE Canada database.
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