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What is Ocean Networks Canada doing with this video and data
Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) is an ocean observing facility hosted by the University of Victoria (UVic). ONC has vast networks of underwater cable infrastructure for the purpose of live and continuous communications with hundreds of instruments. These instruments record live data while many hundred to thousands of meters underwater, and can go through diverse and rare marine environments.
ONC often has to maintain this cabled infrastructure and instrumentation throughout the year. We go out to sea with contracted vessels with access to Remote Operated Vehicles (ROV)s. These ROVs record their path while performing operative actions and are excellent sources for opportunistic visual observations of species.
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These are the type of encounters we can find while using the ROV! |
On the image to the left you might be able to see a shark, and rockfish, and maybe even a sole.
At ONC, we try to annotate biological observations as we support other operational needs during shore support shifts. These annotations are selected from a pre-set selection of buttons with commonly spotted taxa. The buttons are tethered to the widely accepted WoRMS taxonomy. Our goal is to provide this novel biological presence data to the Ocean Biodiversity Information System, or OBIS for short. This is a central hub for all biodiversity data and has been accepted as the recognized format by the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. ONC wants to contribute our massive data holdings of opportunistic biological presence data to OBIS, where it can ultimately be used by anyone - be them a researcher wanting to establish new biodiversity models, governments or industry for conservation efforts, or citizen scientists for their own curiousity.
However, the shore loggers can only do so much with our annotations. This is where We Need Your Help.
ONC has created a method for Expert Reviewers to vet these annotations. This can be accessed online through our SeaTube V3 web interface. Expert Reviewers are required for our data to pass quality assurance and quality control steps, as we want to ensure the data contributed to the OBIS repository is as accurate as can be.
Become an Expert Reviewer
We are requesting help from taxonomic experts! Please get in touch if you are or know someone who qualifies as either:
- undergrad or graduate students in related fields
- post-graduates or researchers
- taxonomic specialists
- citizen scientists
Contributors will be rewarded with attribution to ONC's uploaded datasets to OBIS. ONC is also prepared to provide participation incentives like potential swag giveaways to the most dedicated Expert Reviewers!
If you are interested in becoming an Expert Reviewer, please reach out to us through [insert OBIS-specific ONC email] or sign up and contact out our [insert our science hub group] on ONC's Science Hub social media.
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Register for an Oceans 3.0 account & get access to the Expert Review Page
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How to review biological annotations
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Reach out to our staff to become an Expert Reviewer as described in SeaTube V3 Expert Review Help - Become an Expert Reviewer ONC staff will send out an invitation to start reviewing a new dataset. These will be in the form of completed dives. Please wait until there has been an invitation sent for a particular dive event before reviewing any observation annotations. |
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Go to the dive page in SeaTube V3 after signing into your account with Oceans 3.0. The link should be provided in the invitation email. You can alternatively navigate there yourself under Expedition Management. Look for the dive name mentioned in the email.
ONC staff will send out an invitation to start reviewing a new dataset. These datasets will be in the form of completed dives with video footage. Click on the play button in the list or to the right in the catalog details to open. |
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Click the ellipses (...) at the blue top bar of the dive page to select your widget view. We strongly recommend the "Videocentric" view at this time.
In the future there may be a "Expert Reviewer" predefined layout, which should be set to the default. We are hoping to implement this sometime in the near future. |
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Click the three lines on the top bar of the annotation list to access the filter parameters. From there you can select the Add Filter option. Select the WoRMS Taxonomy from the dropdown list of options. This is required for streamlined and simple access to only the biological annotations in the annotation list.
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How to vote: The filter is showing only WoRMS annotations (120 of 380 total) |
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Green: an Upvote - click on the "thumbs up" if you agree with the classification of the annotation. Red: a Downvote - click on the "thumbs down" if you disagree with the classification. Gray: no Vote - leave the thumb icons alone to avoid voting on an annotation. Click the colored icon to undo. |
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After closing the dive dataset for review, these votes will get tallied and inform ONC on which identifications are under consensus and which are controversial. The annotations under consensus will eventually move on to getting pushed into an OBIS records for publishing onto OBIS. That's all you need to do to have your opinion heard! For more information on SeaTube V3 and its modular widgets, please refer back to SeaTube V3 Help. |
Contacts for questions or suggestions
ONC is happy to communicate with our Taxonomic Experts! We recognize that there is room for improvement, and would like to collect information from our user base to help inform changes to our infrastructure in the future.
If you have any questions about the Taxonomic Expert Review process, or if you have any suggestions on how to improve it, please reach out to:
- [insert OBIS-specific ONC email]
Additionally, you can reach out to the Data Stewards responsible for this project:
- Sean Tippett - stippett@oceannetworks.ca
- Greg Baillie - gbaillie@oceannetworks.ca