NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center monitors important fish species in Hawai‘i to support sustainable fishing and healthy oceans. A key focus is the “Deep 7” bottomfish—six species of snapper and one grouper that are culturally and economically important across the Hawaiian Islands.
To understand how many fish are in the ocean and how populations are changing, scientists need accurate, unbiased data. Traditional data often comes from commercial fishing reports, which can be influenced by market prices or fishing preferences. To improve accuracy, NOAA now uses fishery-independent surveys—data collected directly by scientists using underwater camera systems.
NOAA uses special stereo-video camera systems called BotCam and MOUSS, which record high-quality underwater footage at depths up to 300 meters. These cameras sit about 10 feet above the seafloor and capture images of bottomfish in their natural habitat without disturbing them.
This work produces millions of underwater images, far more than scientists can analyze on their own.
Your role is to help review underwater images and identify the fish you see. This creates essential training data for future machine-learning tools that will automatically identify fish species.
As a volunteer, you will:
Review underwater photos and videos
Identify and tag fish species, focusing on the “Deep 7”
Help create accurate training datasets for computer vision models
Support more precise estimates of fish abundance in Hawai‘i
Your contributions make a real scientific impact:
Improves accuracy of fish population assessments
Supports sustainable fishing and ocean conservation
Enables machine-learning tools to analyze huge datasets in the future
Helps NOAA better protect culturally important Hawaiian species
Without volunteers, it would be impossible to analyze every image collected.
By participating, you help scientists better understand and protect Hawai‘i’s deep-water fish populations. Your work supports sustainable fisheries and contributes to advancing marine conservation research.
