Año Nuevo Island Animal Count: analyzing citizen science pinniped counts from drone imagery ...

• Main Author: Wood, Sarah
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2020
• Subjects: drone imagery; Marine mammals; crowd-sourced data; Elephant Seals
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.7291/d1j66x; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.7291/D1J66X

Fluctuations in marine mammal abundance can reveal changes in local ecosystem health and inform conservation strategies. Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) such as drones are increasingly being used to photograph and count marine mammals in remote locations; however, counting animals in images is a laborious task. Crowd-sourced science has the potential to considerably reduce the time required to conduct these censuses but must first be validated against expert counts to confirm accuracy. Our objectives were to examine the citizen science counts for accuracy, identify costs and benefits of drone imagery and citizen science for pinniped censuses, and make recommendations for future uses of the data. We obtained and uploaded drone imagery of Año Nuevo Island in California to a custom citizen science website (sealcount.com) that instructed volunteers to count seals and sea lions. Across 212 days, over 1,500 volunteers counted northern elephant seals, harbor seals, California sea lions, and Steller sea lions in ...