Author Topic: Science Week Citizen Science  (Read 1701 times)

Offline Peter B

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Science Week Citizen Science
« on: August 17, 2018, 08:07:38 AM »
It's Science Week here in Australia, and as usual the (Australian) ABC is promoting a citizen science project.

This year it's Virtual Reef Diver, where the idea is to identify what's in photos of the Great Barrier Reef.

The website is https://www.virtualreef.org.au/

For Australian participants, every five photos you classify earns you one ticket in a competition to win a camera.

The idea is that you're shown a photo of a small section of reef, and the program places 15 random circles on the image. Your job is then to specify what's in each circle - hard coral, soft coral, algae, sand or something else.

Personally, I'm not finding this as interesting as previous SW citizen science projects. The main problem is the quality of the photos is poor enough that it's often hard to tell between hard coral, soft coral and just plain rock. It's not helped by the fact that the Help Page photos are ideal pictures of the various features rather than samples of the sorts of photos you have to classify.

But still, it's a bit of useful citizen science intended to help an iconic object.