Using Citizen Science to Close Gaps in Cabled Ocean Observatory Research

Abstract:

Ocean Networks Canada operates the world-leading NEPTUNE and VENUS cabled ocean observatories off the west coast of British Columbia, and a community observatory in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. Continuous power and connectivity permit large volumes of data to be collected and made available to scientists and citizens alike over the Internet through a web-based interface. The Oceans 2.0 data management system contains over one quarter petabyte of data, including more than 20,000 hours of video from fixed seafloor cameras and a further 8,000 hours of video collected by remotely operated vehicles.

Cabled observatory instrument deployments enable the collection of high-frequency, long-duration time series of data from a specific location. This enables the study of important questions such as whether effects of climate change—for instance, variations in temperature or sea-level—are seen over the long term. However, cabled observatory monitoring also presents challenges to scientific researchers: the overwhelming volume of data and the fixed spatial location can be barriers to addressing some big questions.

Here we describe how Ocean Networks Canada is using Citizen Science to address these limitations and supplement cabled observatory research. Two applications are presented:

1. Digital Fishers is a crowd-sourcing application in which participants watch short deep-sea video clips and make annotations based on scientific research questions. To date, 3,000 participants have contributed 140,000 scientific observations on topics including sablefish abundance, hydrothermal vent geology and deep-sea feeding behaviour.
2. Community Fishers is a program in which ordinary citizens aboard vessels of opportunity collect ocean data including water temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen and chlorophyll. The program’s focus is to directly address the typical quality concerns around data that are collected using a citizen science approach. This is done by providing high quality scientific instruments and basic (but imperative) training to the citizens and vessel operators who participate. The data are downloaded using a specially designed tablet app, and then transmitted to Oceans 2.0 where raw and corrected data and metadata are made available through the web in real-time.