Underwater Detective Work: How Tech is Helping Us Understand Our Seas

A New Tool for Understanding the Deep

The ocean floor is a mystery. We have lots of pictures, but making sense of them is hard. People usually do this by hand. It takes a long time and costs a lot. But there's a new tool called Squidle+. It's changing the game.

Machine Learning Meets the Ocean

Squidle+ uses something called machine learning. This is like teaching a computer to recognize patterns. The problem is, these computers need lots of examples to learn from. And usually, those examples are from just one or two places. That's not very helpful.

A Massive Dataset

But Squidle+ did something different. It gathered pictures and notes from 325 trips around Australia. That's over 150,000 pictures! And 1.7 million notes. That's a lot of data. With so much information, the computer can learn better. It can recognize things like:

• Seagrass
• Big seaweed
• Coral

It can even tell the difference between different types of seaweed.

Understanding the Whole Picture

The computer didn't just learn from any old pictures. It learned from whole trips. That way, it can understand what the whole area looks like. Not just bits and pieces. And it's good at it. It can guess right up to 96.5% of the time. That's pretty amazing.

For Everyone to Use

But it's not just about the computer. The people behind Squidle+ want everyone to use this tool. So, they made it easy. They put the computer's brain and all the instructions online. Now, anyone can use it to study the ocean.