Keeping Track of Hawaii’s Bottomfish Populations With the Help of Citizen Scientists
July 16, 2022
Results suggest that accumulated citizen scientist data can achieve accuracy levels approaching that of expert annotators, which can help produce large volumes of high-quality training data to improve machine learning algorithms.
The “Deep 7” bottomfish complex, which consists of six snapper and one grouper species, is a group that carries high economic and cultural importance to the islands of Hawaii. These bottomfish have been monitored through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center's Deep 7 fishery-independent surveys since 2016. These surveys use underwater stereo camera systems that produce hundreds of thousands of images that must be annotated by human analysts in order to generate species-specific, size-structured abundance estimates. We developed a citizen science project, called “OceanEYEs,” as a means to effectively process this imagery. A beta test was conducted to determine the accuracy of citizen science annotations in comparison to expert annotators.
Ra H, Richards BL, Rollo A, Miller-Greene D, Taylor J. 2022. Keeping track of Hawaii's bottomfish populations with the help of citizen scientists. Fisheries, 47: 510-515. https://doi.org/10.1002/fsh.10812.