Sept. 14, 2012 — The public is invited to help identify objects they see in images of the seafloor through a new interactive website called "Seafloor Explorer." The result of a unique collaboration between oceanographers studying seafloor habitats, Web programmers and social scientists, Seafloor Explorer (www.seafloorexplorer.org) launches September 13.
The team has more than 40 million images, but are launching the site with a preliminary set of 100,000 all of them taken by HabCam, a habitat mapping underwater vehicle. HabCam was developed and built by the HabCam group, which comprises marine biologists and engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) as well as fishermen and other scientists. The Seafloor Explorer interactive website was funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and built in collaboration with the HabCam Group by the Citizen Science Alliance (CSA), the developers behind interactive sites found on Zooniverse.org.
Public contributors to the website will say whether they see fish, scallops and other organisms in each image, provide basic measurements, and describe whether the seafloor is sand or gravel, and whether they see boulders and other interesting objects in the frame.
"We're really excited about this project," says Dr. Scott Gallager, a WHOI biologist in the HabCam Group and Principal Investigator of the Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration project to develop the next generation HabCam imaging system, the first project to use the new annotation tool. "We'll gain a greater understanding of organisms living on the seafloor and create maps of habitats at a resolution that we would not be able to do without this kind of help because of the manpower required."
Ultimately contributions by the public will help scientists answer questions about the distribution of scallops and other resources relative to their predators such as starfish and the composition of their habitat. Along the way, the contributors have a chance to enjoy working with seafloor imagery that has never been seen before, through a unique Web interface.
"There's a lot of technology under the hood to make this a compelling user experience," says Dr. Arfon Smith, director of Citizen Science at The Adler Planetarium, home of the Zooniverse websites.