Zooniverse

So many penguins, so little time. That was the dilemma facing Penguin Lifelines, a project at the University of Oxford. Scientists installed 50 cameras in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean to watch colonies of penguins. The observations would provide new details on penguin behavior, and on penguins’ response to the changing climate.

The problem, though, was that the project yielded far more pictures than the researchers could review. So they turned to Zooniverse, a project that unites professional scientists with volunteers. More than 25,000 people have signed up to help. They look through the images and identify adult penguins, chicks, and nests, plus other animals. The volunteers have classified about three million pictures.

Zooniverse began in 2007 with a single project — helping astronomers classify galaxies. Today, it incorporates about four dozen projects across many disciplines — from archaeology to zoology.

Several projects have a connection to marine science. In one, volunteers pore through hundreds of thousands of satellite images to identify forests of giant kelp. The kelp provide food and habitat for many organisms, and help minimize storm damage by absorbing the energy of coastal waves.

One project has already wrapped up. Volunteers studied pictures of the sea floor off the northeastern coast of the U.S. They identified the type of sea floor and cataloged millions of scallops, sea stars, and other creatures — a marine “zoo” from the Zooniverse.