Where's Walleye?

It Works!

Date: February 11, 2025

After a long hiatus, our lab has processed some of the data that volunteers classified and can confirm that the underwater cameras work just as well, and in some cases, better than traditional netting techniques. Which is great news for researchers and the fish! Underwater cameras are easier to place in wetlands for researchers, and is less invasive/stressful for fish...a win/win! 😃

How things stack-up:

• Underwater cameras measure wetland health/quality through the Wetland Fish Index (WFI) as effectively as traditional fyke (funnel) nets

• Cameras capture more species than nets

• Cameras capture more fish (individuals) than nets

• Four species of fish were only found on cameras (golden shiner, common carp, black crappie, and smallmouth bass)

• Two species were only found in nets (tadpole madtom, and round goby)

Completion of the Yes/No Workflow!

Date: March 26, 2024

Thank you so much for your hard work! We have sped through all the footage we have collected thus far for this project and identified the clips with fish occurrences. This is a major help to our research team!

Here is an update for Where's Walleye?

• Currently at 1,865 registered volunteers
• Completed 82,615 classifications in the month of March alone
• Retired over 150,000 subject sets
• Finished all subject sets for the Yes/No Workflow
• 844 subject sets have been retired for the Fish ID Workflow

Since we Launched (in numbers)

Date: February 14, 2024

• Launched 21 days ago
• Have 1,089 volunteers
• Completed 104,065 classifications
• That means on average a volunteer performed nearly a 100 classifications each (95.6)
• Retired 31,346 subjects
• Reviewed 87 hours of footage
• Discovered that there was a 90% incidence of no-fish (so thank you for your commitment to keep searching!)
• Have over 3,000 10-second clips ready to ID the fish in them (in our New ID Workflow)

This is all such amazing work, and our team cannot believe how quickly this was all achieved. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you! Now time for Round Two!

Some highlights of fish (and non-fish) sightings our volunteers have caught!