Show HN: Earth Day dashboard for the Reef ~ 11.8k mins / 3k contribs today

For anyone else interested, the project is a 'shared-economy' style attempt to collect broad scale 'reconnaissance' data on remote / knowledge-lite areas of the Great Barrier Reef (currently only 5% of the reef is regularly surveyed). Ultimate goal is to improve models used for targeted management / research / conservation efforts.

If you were on the Great Barrier Reef between Oct-Dec last year you could contribute by submitting photos of the reef (we also ran a large number of expeditions to remote locations, manned by volunteers and researchers). Stats are on the site, but we ended up collecting over 13,000 from over 600 sites (the reef is over 2,300km long).

Today you can contribute by helping us to analyse these images. Jump on the site and we'll teach you how to do that (basically paint by numbers to categorise what you see) and then serve you up as many random images as you can handle.

At the moment the data is being used to measure coral cover and feed into research modelling. But there's a lot of room to move. E.g. we're also looking to develop vision models for reef-scape imagery on the GBR using polygon data from the analyses.

Also worth mentioning that all of the collected data, including imagery, metadata, analyses, and any vision models produced, will be open sourced (or otherwise released under permissive licenses) as soon as possible.

Cheers!

Exactly.

The first Earth Day was declared by word of mouth among teenagers in the 1970's.

On short notice without the existence of cell phones or internet.

Viral they would say now.

Interesting what a teenager can do sometimes.