FinVision

FinVision

Why is FinVision important?

Understanding which types of habitat are essential for juvenile fish is vital to promoting sustainable fisheries and safeguarding the future of recreational and commercial fisheries. Without the conservation and management of key juvenile fish nursery areas, recruitment into the adult stock of species like bass, grey mullet and flounder, that rely on inshore and estuarine areas for the first years of their life, could be heavily impacted. There is little knowledge of the habitat requirements of the earliest life stages of juvenile fish when they are at their most vulnerable.

Therefore, FinVision aims to fill current knowledge gaps and identify which habitats are essential nursery areas for fish during their earliest life stages. With these findings we can better advocate for policy decisions and decisive action that protects these vulnerable life stages, such as through Essential Fish Habitat Mapping and Fisheries Management Plans.

Our Aim

We aim to deploy our juvenile habitat monitoring cameras (JHaM Cam's) in the Plymouth Sound National Marine Park and surrounding areas to gain insights into local juvenile habitat quality. Currently, our workflows contain images and videos from coastal areas throughout the south of the UK, from Cornwall to Hampshire. We aim to use footage from our cameras to obtain information on fish abundance and size in different habitat types. In doing so, we will generate hours of data that would be difficult to analyse by a single research team. We therefore would kindly ask you, as citizen scientists, to help us analyse our footage and contribute to active research. Additionally, we aim to use the data generated by you to train artificial intelligence (AI), so that fish within future images and videos can be automatically detected, therefore limiting the processing time for future research.

How Can I Get Involved with FinVision?

Within this interactive web portal you can help us analyse footage from our cameras and in doing so, contribute to active research in essential fish habitat. We have one currently active workflow which shows videos from a range of underwater habitats. Though the juvenile fish may be hard to spot and there may not be many of them, each individual seen is extremely important to further our understanding of habitat use at this life stage. Although we won't ask you what species they are, please feel free to read the field guide to understand some of the fish you may see!

We will use the data generated by you to create scientific publications and will ensure the data is made public through continual storage within MEDIN (Marine Environmental Data and Information Network) data guidelines.

We suggest that our camera footage is analysed on a laptop/PC due to the nature of some of the tasks. The fish drawing/identification tool might not be suitable for touchscreens on iPhone/Android. This drawing tool is essential to the project however as it will train the AI system to identify fish outlines in complex environments.

We also suggest making an account with Zooniverse. With your account, you can record your classifications and see any recent images/videos that you have analysed. Signing in will therefore streamline the process of analysis!