September 30, 2020 — The Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center is launching a new citizen science project called OceanEYEs. We are seeking volunteers to help find Deep 7 bottomfish in underwater videos.
A student in the Young Scientist Opportunity program and our scientists have partnered with Zooniverse.org to develop a user-friendly web page called OceanEYEs. There, citizen scientists can help review images from our annual bottomfish survey, tagging and identifying all the fish that they see. Scientists can then use those data to train advanced artificial intelligence (AI) tools, to look at different ways of counting fish in video. The data can also be used as information for stock assessments.
The images are collected every year during the Bottomfish Fishery-Independent Survey in Hawaii (#BFISH) using state of the art stereo-camera systems. The survey provides an estimate of the number of “Deep 7” bottomfish. That’s a group of seven species of fish that have both economic and cultural value to the islands. The data from this survey are used in the Deep 7 stock assessment to provide managers with the best information to make management decisions. That includes annual commercial fishery catch limits.