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Invader ID

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See Results

Thank you for your efforts! We've completed our project! Check out our Results page. To browse other active projects that still need your classifications, check out zooniverse.org/projects.

Results

Invader ID was a great success! 8,500+ volunteers made this project possible, including testing, tweaking, testing again, tweaking, and then making real specifies identifications of biofouling invertebrates on panels photographed by our scientists and collaborators.

We analyzed the data you collected and published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal, Frontiers in Marine Science: Engaging Online Citizen Scientists and the Consensus Method to Monitor the Marine Biofouling Community

Paper Highlights:

  • Volunteers (that’s you!) can accurately identify many species in the biofouling community.
    • Easiest to identify: Branching Bryozoans an Solitary Tunicates
    • Hardest to agree on: Bare spots on the biofouling plates
  • Most volunteers tried Invader ID once, with 3% of all volunteers making most of the species identifications.
  • We found that 4 volunteers was the ideal number to get the most accurate and efficient species identifications.
    • Each biofouling plate was overlayed with 50 random points, and then volunteers identified the species at those points.
    • Multiple volunteers identified species at each point and we investigated the best way to get agreement or consensus.
  • Where the plate was located along the California coast had the strongest impact on the biofouling community.
    • We calculated community composition (looking at species identified at all 50 points) for each plate.
    • Scientists and volunteers differed in their final community composition determination, but had little impact compared to site.
  • With the Invader ID method validated for monitoring marine biofouling communities, we hope it can set the foundation for future monitoring work.

Invader ID was a beloved project by all involved, and we hope that someday it comes back or inspires a new virtual biofouling monitoring project. Thank you so much for making this work possible!

If you have any questions, comments, or stories to share please reach out to Rachael Mady, the Participatory Science Coordinator at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (MadyR@si.edu).