Take action: Support citizen science online
Introduction
Take action online and help marine conservation from the comfort of your home.Online citizen science projects are a perfect match for those who want to give back but need a flexible option. You can do them anywhere with a computer and internet connection.
What are citizen science projects?
Citizen science projects are large-scale science projects. Hundreds of people around the world can help with science research. Volunteers can help with tasks that would take too much time for researchers to do alone. Such as watching web-cams or identifying species in photos.
You don’t need any prior knowledge of the topic to make a meaningful contribution. There are plenty of tutorials and easy-to-follow instructions to help you get started. There is no minimum time you need to spend, and you will not need to follow a schedule. You just contribute whatever time you want when it suits you.
Get started with Spyfish Aotearoa
Be a marine scientist with Spyfish Aotearoa. In this project, you will help to train an AI (artificial intelligence) to know how to recognise specific species of fish.
Watch video clips of 10-seconds and identify and count fish species from marine reserves across the country. Once you are familiar with the fish, you can try a fish detection task. Here you will draw rectangles around blue cod, snapper and scarlet wrasse in photos. This will help to train a computer programme to recognise the fish in new videos and pictures.
Your support will help determine how effect our marine reserves are. It will also help guide decisions for marine management and protect our taonga (treasured) species. So far, over 2,000 people have contributed to the project and over 50,000 fish have been counted.
The Spyfish Aotearoa project uses the Zooniverse platform. It is run by the Department of Conservation and Wildlife.AI.
Learn more about Spyfish Aotearoa:
- Interview on RNZ about the Spyfish Aotearoa project
- Spyfish Aotearoa project on the Science Learning Hub
Explore more citizen science on Zooniverse
Projects hosted on Zooniverse are submitted by real researchers from across the global. Then people around the world lend a hand. They do this by reviewing data, video or other images, then recording what they find.
By doing this, volunteers have enabled research that would not have been possible or practical without them. They have also made unexpected findings that have led to scientifically significant discoveries.
Join the community and find out other ways you can support scienctific progress on the Zooniverse website.