Over the past few years we have been striving to improve our workflow for fish imagery annotation. We would like to introduce two initiatives that we have developed that will help to optimise your workflow:
GlobalArchive, an online portal for archiving, sharing and synthesising fish imagery annotation
and
CheckEM, a web app to perform standard quality control checks on fish imagery annotation, exported from the EventMeasure software from SeaGIS.
GlobalArchive has been adopted by multiple management and research agencies in Australia as a repository and database for their fish imagery annotation (e.g. Parks Australia and the National Environmental Science Program), to build towards making this data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reproducible.
GlobalArchive has been used to conduct an Australian synthesis of baited remote underwater stereo-video (stereo-BRUV) producing two publications so far:
studying the impact of human activity on fish body-size distribution at a continental scale and
providing design principles for no-take marine reserves.
This synthesis is currently being expanded to other stereo-video methods including diver-based and ROV surveys.
CheckEM brings together all the quality control lessons learned from these synthesis projects. Using established life history and distribution information to check the reliability of fish image annotations globally. We recommended CheckEM should be used before uploading data to GlobalArchive. See this video for a live demonstration of CheckEM.
GlobalArchive has also been used to contribute data towards global studies on shark abundance distribution and recognised as part of a Global Ocean Observing System Best-practice and foundation for observing marine life.
GlobalArchive is currently being further developed to increase the availability of metadata records and open data within it to both biodiversity (e.g. AODN, OBIS) and environmental reporting portals (e.g. NationalMap) in partnership with the Australian Research Data Commons.
GlobalArchive is also collaborating closely with a newly federally funded (AUD$1 million) Automated Fish Identification Project, building on the unique way that GlobalArchive collates both annotation point data and summarises this data to the survey scale.
GlobalArchive has been recognised to be a key part of the recently funded International Council for Science’s Special Committee on Oceanic Research funded CoNCENSUS project, made up of marine researchers from 24 nations: Advancing standardisation of COastal and Nearshore demersal fish visual CENSUS techniques. In particular for complementary data visualisation and imagery visualisation initiatives currently under development.
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We invite you to use CheckEM to complement your data quality control measures and to submit your data to GlobalArchive.
We would be grateful to receive your feedback on either initiatives, please submit your feedback here.
Please find the how-to guides here for both GlobalArchive and CheckEM.
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Acknowledgements for current funding
This research was supported by “GlobalArchive: Harnessing fish and shark image data for powerful biodiversity reporting” received investment from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), funded by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. This research was also supported by the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program Marine and Coastal Hub. Their motivation is to make fish imagery annotation data more FAIR.
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Recent media on GlobalArchive:
Marine reserve study offers insights to protect ocean life
FAIR workflows for fish image annotation