Upcoming Citizen Science Project on Zooniverse
This article from the Faculty of Science announces the launch of Dani Montocchio’s (PhD candidate; Pat Chow-Fraser Lab) upcoming citizen science project on Zooniverse on January 22, 2024.“This project is a part of my thesis exploring the impacts of changing water-levels in Georgian Bay on coastal wetland ecosystems and communities. Specifically, I am researching whether the appearance of dead/dying inundated terrestrial plants in the nearshores of these wetlands is altering fish community composition and access to the nearshore by acting as a filtering barrier, similar to what is seen in mangrove wetlands. The Zooniverse project will help me process the thousands of hours of underwater footage that I have collected in front and behind these plants to see if there are community/size differences in the fish that use the nearshore habitat. Volunteers will look at a 10 second video clip, and determine whether or not there are fish in the video. Afterwards, positive fish occurrence clips will be processed by myself for species identification and size/age estimations. Ultimately, we hope to use these data to provide a training dataset for a machine learning algorithm to do this pre-processing for us in the future. Such a model and understanding of this relatively novel nearshore habitat in Georgian Bay may be critical, as with climate change, these inundated terrestrial plants in the nearshore are predicted to occur in greater frequency and extent in the future.”
NewsPhD student enlists citizen scientists and AI researchers for wetland research
