Calling all citizen scientists!
Play Digital Fishers while helping a marine biologist better understand how creatures in the deep ocean live – where there is no light and food is scarce!
Ocean Networks Canada is observing these deep sea creatures with cameras that collect huge volumes of video 24/7 and transmit the images to ONC data centre via the Internet.
Your challenge will be to count and identify the animals in each one-minute clip (up to 500 of them!) that are attracted by the food patches that have been placed in Barkley Canyon’s installation at 890 m depth. The game has five levels, with reward cards earned as your experience grows. Find out who can “catch” the most animals?
The “Feeding Deep Sea Critters” campaign will run for several months. Thank you to our citizen scientists for helping the world better understand our ocean planet.
Digital Fishers is a science-oriented, crowdsourcing game-with-a-purpose that recruits people on the web to gather data selected from thousands of hours of video, archived every year from undersea cameras. But, how do we make this massive flood of data scientifically useful? This is where you come in!
The assistance from citizens in automated analysis of big data is important to a host of global scientists. Ocean Networks Canada operates undersea observatories off the west coast of British Columbia and in the Arctic that collect, deliver and archive complex and diverse data from hundreds of sensors and instruments, in realtime over the Internet. Along with smaller community observatories in the Arctic Ocean and Salish Sea, these data collect up to 50 terabytes per year. Recorded video from seafloor cameras alone equals over 5.5 terabytes—enough to fill over 12,000 DVDs.
From Peru to Australia and South Africa to Switzerland, over 2,900 Digital Fishers players from around the world have made over 138,000 observations, or annotations, since its launch in late 2011. The record holder hails from the U.S., with over 20,000 annotations, but players range in age and background.
“It’s a perfect outlet for wannabe scientists, from retirees to parents with children,” says Jodie Walsh, Digital Fishers program coordinator. “They’re all learning about the ocean, and doing something meaningful at the same time.”
Digital Fishers was developed by the University of Victoria’s Ocean Networks Canada with the Centre for Global Studies, and is funded by Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation Network (CANARIE).
