Finished! Looks like this project is out of data at the moment!
Thank you everyone for participating! We have finished the data, results to come. To browse other active projects that still need your classifications, check out zooniverse.org/projects
FAQ
What are the different killer whale ecotypes in the region and how do you differentiate?
There are three main ecotypes of killer whales in this region. Information on the differences between these ecotypes is in our Education section. For the purposes of this study, the focus will be to pick out images with any killer whale in the image and one does not need to differentiate by ecotype. This will be conducted by researchers later on.
What if I am having trouble identifying killer whales and unsure if an object in a picture is a killer whale or some other object or species?
The Introduction, Field Guides, Tutorial, and Help text can assist in the identification process, but if you are still experiencing difficulties please feel free to reach out to our team. If you are actively going through an image and are still unsure if an object is a killer whale or something else after referring to our guides, it is always better to mark the image as "yes" contains a killer whale. The images that are marked "yes" will be further analyzed. Also, images are assessed by multiple volunteers, to get an accurate response.
What if killer whales are present, but do not appear in the photo?
Sometimes it is possible that killer whales are underwater at the time of the image. If they were around the area for a reasonable amount of time, they should appear in a different image and therefore will be "counted" in the other image. If they were not around for an extended period of time, they were likely travelling by and not exhibiting predation behavior.
Some of the Steller sea lions are marked, what does this mean?
Please refer to our sister project, Steller Watch, for more information about these markings.
What if I provide an incorrect response to a question?
The images will be assessed by multiple users, so the majority will be used as the correct answer. If there are large discrepancies between the answers, a biologist will likely review the photos. Any response is better than no response and gets us closer to our end goal.
Why are volunteers needed to do this?
We have over 500,000 images, so there is too many for one biologist to do. The three options considered were 1) coordinating volunteers, 2) machine learning- which is a method used to train computers to "look" through the images and pick out "objects" (aka killer whales) or 3) citizen science. We decided that setting up machine learning would be time consuming and require specific skillsets. Since one of our researchers has conducted studies using citizen science, we thought it would be a fun, effective way, of analyzing the photo data.