Are you an avid scuba diver in California? Are you from the San Diego area and love bringing a camera out with you when you scuba dive? If so, you can participate in citizen science and impact shark conservation efforts.
Intro
Ocean Sanctuaries, a marine citizen science non-profit founded in 2014, brings marine citizen science to the general public. They are based out of San Diego, CA.
Mike Bear and his dive buddy, Barbara Lloyd, participated in many various citizen science programs in California. Running out of citizen science programs to participate in, they set up a marine non-profit to promote and train others in marine citizen science.
Ocean Sanctuaries collaborates between citizen scientists, scientists, and other like-minded organizations. They hope to foster greater understanding, species protection, and good stewardship of the ocean and related habitats. They accomplish these goals by creating a community that educates and shares information through multi-media, social media, and the web. Ocean sanctuaries also provide data and imagery, gathered by citizen scientists, available to the general public, scientists, and other organizations. The non-profit commits to filling data gaps and sharing data with other groups whenever possible.
Ocean Sanctuaries and Sharkophile encourage you to participate in this research yourself. Learn how you can help below.
The Sevengill Shark ID Project
Around 2010, divers in San Diego reported increased encounters with sevengill sharks. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) did not have enough data to designate a conservation tag for sevengill sharks. Therefore, to provide CITES with data, Ocean Sanctuaries started the Sevengill Shark ID Project. The Sevengill Shark ID Project is Ocean Sanctuaries’ longest-running project.
The Sevengill Shark ID Project began as a spreadsheet in 2009. The spreadsheet allows local divers to log their encounters with sevengill sharks. The project features a growing international collaboration with such institutions as the Two Oceans Aquarium in South Africa and several well-known shark researchers in the US who have graciously offered their time and expertise to make sure the project gets things right.
The Sevenfill Shark ID Project uses an open-source pattern recognition program, originally developed at NASA, to identify star patterns in the sky. The open-sourced software is developed by the non-profit Wild Me (PI Jason Holmberg) and research partners at the University of Illinois-Chicago (PI Tanya Berger-Wolf), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (PI Charles V. Stewart), and Princeton University (PI Daniel Rubenstein) [learn more at wildme.org] Ocean Sanctuaries and Jason tailored the recognition program to individualize patterns in Sevengill sharks freckling patterns.
“The Sevengill Shark ID Project has gone on to become our flagship project,” says Mike Bear.
The Sevengill Shark ID Project analyzes the freckling patterns that appear between eye, gill, and snout areas of the Sevengill shark, to determine if the same individual animals are returning year-to-year to the same location in San Diego and Cape Town.
The project includes asking divers to submit photos of their encounters with this species, which their Principal Investigators then submit to the AI algorithm for analysis. Photos appear in Ocean Sanctuaries’ peer-reviewed papers.
The data also supports collaborative mark-recapture, molecular ecology, and social ecology studies, especially where citizen science and artificial intelligence helps scale-up projects.
“Sucess for us is to fill in data gaps, such as conservation status data gaps for data deficient species and data gaps in areas like Cape Town,” says Bear.
If you dive in San Diego or Cape Town, bring a camera with you next time. Upload any photo of a sevengill shark to the database to participate in filling important data gaps.
For more information, please see here:
The Sharks of California Project
The Sharks of California Project uses a citizen science tool called ‘Fieldscope,’ which can be used with any citizen science project. Fieldscope is a database collection tool designed for any citizen science project. Citizen scientists upload a photograph to a database for data analysis.
“We collect the data, and scientists take our data to conduct scientific studies. They confirm the fact that shark populations are struggling, which in turn is used to create policies protecting sharks,” explains Mike Bear.
For this project specifically, Fieldscope allows divers to upload photos of any non-Sevengill sharks species they have encountered. The photos are then used to create a species map off California’s coast. The Sharks of California project is a long-term project that is available to use for any scientific research.
“Success for Sharks of California is that we collect data on anomalous events (such as the great heatwave of 2014) and document species of shark in our area that are not native to this area. We’ve got the data, in case anyone wants to use it,” explains Mike Bear. Hammerhead sharks, a species commonly found in warm waters, were spotted in San Diego after California’s heatwave in 2014. The Sharks of California project documents how climate change affects shark species’ swimming routes.
Contribute to scientific research and log your encounter with a shark species here.