Now we know what we’re doing when we get home tonight!
Crowdsourcing Marine Science With Seafloor Explorer
Do marine science from home, because scuba diving is hard!
From the folks that brought you GalaxyZoo, a crowdsourced, citizen science project to catalogue and annotate Hubble Space Telescope images, comes Seafloor Explorer.
Whether you’re an armchair marine biologist or not, Seafloor Explorer is a neat way to help identify and classify the marine species living off the Northeast Coast of the U.S. A robotic craft called HabCam has been swimming over huge swaths of the northern Atlantic shallows taking pictures of whatever is beneath it. That’s where you come in.
Using a simple interface, you look through some of the thousands of images, identify the kind of ground cover (sand, shells, gravel, etc.) and count and measure the living species you see. There’s a nice tutorial on their site to show you how it’s done. I’ve found many, many shells and a few fish so far (plus a boatload of sand).
Science is part everyone’s world, and everyone should be able to take part. It’s so awesome to see projects like this that let citizens like you and me participate. Take a deep breath and get to clicking!
