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Dive into the sea and help us identify marine creatures living on rocky bottoms
Learn moreHere you can choose which habitat (aka environment) you want to explore.
You can choose among ports, natural sea caves and artificial reefs and dive into their incredible biodiversity.
You will be presented whichever category you choose until you deliberately change it by selecting another from this list. When you are done with all the images of one category (the "already seen" label will appear on your screen) you need to dive into another one, again by selecting it from this list.
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Message from the researcher
Our aim is to assess the quality and status of the marine benthic biodiversity. Citizen scientists make this possible by helping us annotate underwater images!
Marine CreaturesAbout Marine Creatures
Almost everyone has tried to snorkel in order to discover what lives in the sea usually focusing on motile organisms (e.g. fish). However, there are many sessile species attached to the substrate that often go unnoticed. These organisms constitute the "benthos" and can form different types of gatherings, the so-called "benthic communities".
Our project "Marine Creatures" is part of a bigger EU (H2020) project called Nautilos, which aims to develop a new generation of sensors and samplers for physical, chemical and biological essential ocean variables in addition to micro- and nano-plastics. Citizen Science (CS) and public awareness raising is a significant component of the Nautilos project. Crowd-sourcing activities for visual annotation of marine images are being performed by citizen scientists using underwater seabed images.
Citizen scientists are detecting and classifying the most important groups of sessile fauna present, which all together form impressive marine communities commonly hidden from our eyes. The campaign and the mass image crowd sourced data generated from it include selected taxonomic categories and major seafloor organism types, such as macroalgae, sponges, bryozoans and corals. Additional features such as macroplastics and litter are also being investigated. This voluntary Zooniverse project seeks the contribution of citizen scientists to identify the taxonomic groups of sessile benthic communities present in three different marine habitats: artificial reefs, marine ports and natural sea caves.