Danielle Montocchio invents new methods to study wetland ecosystems in Georgian Bay

After years of working with walleye in Georgian Bay, Dr. Pat Chow-Fraser’s lab realized they had a problem – massive water level fluctuations due to climate change had led to changes in habitat use by fish in the bay, leaving them with empty nets and nothing to study. Enter PhD student Danielle Montocchio, who took the lead in coming up with a solution. Working with her father, she constructed underwater video cameras capable of recording the fish as they swam by. Within 2 years, she had over 1000 hours of footage – far too much for one person to watch alone! Undeterred, Danielle came up with the brilliant idea of having volunteer scientists help analyze the video footage via Zooniverse, an online citizen science platform – and then used their input to train AI software to analyze the video recordings, in collaboration with machine learning researchers at Stanford University. Amazing work Danielle!! – you are pushing the boundaries of how we think about doing wetland ecology!