Video cameras, advanced computing tools and a vast undersea fibre optic network are being used to build what’s called the world’s largest seafloor observatory, off the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
Scientists and researchers will make use of the technology to better understand natural hazards, resources, ocean/climate change, ecosystems, tectonic activity and much more.
Members of the public can also use the tools – in fact, they are being counted to do just that!
Crowdsourcing will be an important part of the data analysis process, project organizers describe.
David H. Turpin, PhD, FRSC, President and Vice-Chancellor, University of Victoria, will host an online webcast to commemorate the public launch on December 8, 2009.
NEPTUNE Canada will describe how it has completed installation in the Pacific Ocean of 800 kilometres of powered fibre-optic cable, five observatory nodes at key scientific sites, and over 200 instruments and sensors...(to depths of nearly 3000 metres).
The network, which extends across the Juan de Fuca plate, will be used to gather live data from a rich constellation of instruments deployed in a broad spectrum of undersea environments.
Data will be transmitted via high-speed fibre optic communications from the seafloor to an innovative data archival system at the University of Victoria. This system will provide free Internet access to an immense wealth of data, both live and archived throughout the life of this planned 25-year project.
NEPTUNE is an acronym that stands for North-East Pacific Time-Series Underwater Networked Experiments.
CANARIE, Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation Network, is helping fund the project.
Its $980,000 contribution to the “Data from the Deep, Judgments from the Crowds” project will establish a satellite observatory at Brentwood College School on Vancouver Island and invite members of the public to review short video clips and sound sequences collected by the offshore cabled observatory and provide researchers with their annotations.
“This online volunteering is known as ‘crowdsourcing,’” described NEPTUNE’s Associate Director of Information Technology Benoît Pirenne. “Scientists can draw on this feedback to make more conclusive decisions about the data. Sometimes the human brain is better at analyzing material than software.”
Software agents will help identify some objects and factors, but not everything. Sometimes, the human brain can analyze date much more quickly and easily than software. To this end, the project team is recruiting the help of students and the general public. The new CANARIE funding will support development of software for analysis of video and acoustic data via crowdsourcing, an approach that allows non-experts to help interpret and filter data through the Web.
Non-experts may not be able to identify specific species of fish, but they can certainly identify an orange fish in the video, marking it for further inspection by an expert. Similarly, a non-expert may not be able to tell the difference between songs of the different orca whales, but they could mark unusual sound sequences that may be of interest to marine mammal specialists.
Brentwood students will be provided remote access to VENUS and NEPTUNE’s cameras and sensors installed in the Saanich Inlet and off the west coast of Vancouver Island to enrich their science study.
“We’re a school on the waterfront and we wanted to be more active in monitoring the environment that’s in our own backyard,” says David McCarthy, Brentwood’s director of studies. “We’ll also be doing our own projects in the estuary here in Mill Bay. We’re very excited about this collaboration with UVic.”
The underwater video cameras and hydrophones promise to produce vast amounts of data, more than can be easily analyzed by small teams of scientists. To effectively sort through our mountains of rich-media data, new software will attempt to automatically detect interesting features in the data stream. Part of the CANARIE award will go toward development and improvement of the new detection software.
NEPTUNE Canada acknowledges support and funding from the Government of Canada through the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and CANARIE, and from the Government of British Columbia through the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund.
CANARIE, established in 1993, manages an ultra high-speed network which facilitates leading-edge research and big science across Canada and around the world. More than 39,000 researchers at nearly 200 Canadian universities and colleges use the CANARIE Network, as well as researchers at institutes, hospitals, and government laboratories throughout the country.
For more information, visit www.neptunecanada.ca.