What is Citizen Science?

Citizen Science is when regular people help carry out scientific research, volunteers from all over the world help analyse enormous datasets. This includes identifying and counting animals from camera trap photos, transcribing medieval manuscripts, and classifying galaxies.

What is Spyfish Aotearoa?

Spyfish Aotearoa is a Citizen Science project where volunteers identify and count marine species from underwater videos taken in Aotearoa’s marine reserves. These underwater videos are from the Department of Conservation’s baited underwater video (BUV) surveys.

These surveys provide hundreds of hours of underwater footage and are used to find out how well our marine reserves are doing at protecting important species. However, analysing all the videos takes a long time, especially for one person. Spyfish Aotearoa solves this problem, with over three thousand volunteers analysing 10-second video clips, and the huge collective effort means that species get identified and counted far more quickly than they could be by a single researcher.

Keywords

• Citizen Science
• Spyfish Aotearoa