DIGITAL FISHERS: HELP SCIENTISTS STUDY THE OCEAN…AND HAVE FUN TOO

Whether you’re a young scientist or just young at heart, come try out Digital Fishers, a new citizen science website developed here at Ocean Networks Canada Observatory.

It doesn’t take much of your time.  You’ll be watching 15 second video clips and describing what you see - details such as sea life, water clarity, and seafloor composition. With an easy-to-use interface resembling the dashboard of a research submarine, it’s almost as though you were cruising the ocean seafloor – from your computer. As you complete various levels of observations, you’re rewarded with interesting creature feature cards.

By playing Digital Fishers, you’ll be helping researchers gather data from thousands of hours of video from NEPTUNE Canada installation dives and underwater cameras across their 800 km subsea network.
All this video needs to be studied, but it’s a daunting task for scientists to watch so much footage and describe what they see. This is where you can help.

Crowdsourcing describes the process of taking a task normally performed by specialists and allocating it to volunteers – the crowd – using the Internet. Scientists send out the request for volunteers, allocate the task, send out the data, and collect the responses – all using the web.

Citizen science involves networks of volunteers who may not have specific scientific training, but may perform research-related tasks such as observation and annotation.

Volunteer contributions are vital to making Digital Fishers useful to scientists and will help them better understand the ocean. 

For more details visit Fishing in a Digital Ocean on NEPTUNE Canada’s website and these other helpful sites, to start your underwater journey. And check out these easy Digital Fishers tutorials, both short and long.

Digital Fishers is a joint project developed by NEPTUNE Canada, in partnership with the University of Victoria’s Centre for Global Studies (CfGS) and funded by CANARIE.