British Antarctic Survey Needs Your Assistance: Counting Walruses On Satellite Images

[hatrack]

Researchers are recruiting 500,000 citizen scientists to help count walruses, which face massive challenges as the climate changes. The World Wildlife Fund and the British Antarctic Survey have gathered 600,000 satellite images from the range of the Atlantic and Laptev walrus populations, and each image needs to be reviewed to see if walruses are present. Once the images have been narrowed down, scientists need help count the number of the Arctic marine mammals gathering on shores in the High North.

Walruses prefer to live on sea ice where they can easily access the ocean for clams and snails. But climate change has reduced the sea ice extent, forcing walruses to congregate on land. But the 2,000-pound animals are easily spooked, which can lead to deadly stampedes and presents a challenge for researchers on the ground trying to study walruses.

So instead, they are using satellite images collected by the company Maxar to count the number of walruses in all 600,000 of the 650-foot-by-650-foot frames the company captured in its photos from space in the summers of 2020 and 2021. This data will help establish a baseline for researchers to monitor how climate change affects these populations moving forward, said Peter Fretwell, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey. “This is not just playing, this is actually making real science,” he said. “We need to know about walrus and how they’re being impacted.”

Citizen scientists who participate go through quick training to learn how to identify images with walruses in them, which can be tricky, as rusty barrels and vegetation can be mistaken for groups of walruses. Participants go through images and mark the ones that have walruses in them. Each photo is viewed by several different volunteers to increase the confidence about whether or not it has walruses, which is why such a large number of citizen scientists are helping with the count. Once the images with walruses have been narrowed down, citizen scientists will shift to counting the number of individuals.

EDIT

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16102021/warming-trends-where-have-all-the-walruses-gone-plus-a-maple-mystery-cool-islands-and-the-climate-of-manhattan/

[samnsara]

1. woohoo im siging up!

[hatrack]

2. Yep, me too

[Basic LA]

3. Walruses are Arctic, not Antarctic creatures.

But the study sounds interesting.

[hatrack]

4. They're the BAS - they do science wherever they bloody well like, mate!!

[Basic LA]

5. My bad, mate.

Should've read the whole thing. Sounded at first like they were counting them in Antarctica. Made me think of the Christmas cards that show cartoon penguins frolicking at the north pole.

[hatrack]

6. Or those godawful Coke commercials w. polar bears AND penguins . . .