Example image of a fowling community (source: Zooniverse)
For my service project I worked with Zooniverse, an online project where you can help identify various fowling communities in photographs to help researchers who are trying to identify where specific species of marine life live in order to help contain the spread of invasive species. I completed my service on 10/6/2020 for about 2 hours and 30 minutes.
For this project, I worked to help identify various fouling communities to help identify where different species are native to and what impact they can have on the environment around them. This information will help scientists track change over time and potentially help control the spread of invasive fouling communities.
My activity was to identify the different fouling communities in various pictures. I had to look through the sample pictures and select different properties of the species in the image to help determine what the specific species was. After a while, it became much easier to recognize what was in all the pictures, which made it easier to contribute to the overall project.
While I do not think I was perfectly accurate at identifying the different organisms, I think my work will be very helpful because, over time, it became much easier to identify each of the organisms and I believe that I became more accurate. The work I did will help the researchers of the project recognize what organisms were in the pictures and help them better understand where each of the pictured organisms are native to.
I would absolutely do this project or something similar again in the future. I really like the premise of the project and I understand the importance of preventing the spread of invasive species and furthering our knowledge of the world around us. Identifying the species was quite fun and I feel like I learned a lot after looking at all the different species and types of fouling communities.