What is Mediterranean Spy?
Mediterranean Spy is an exciting project hosted on Ocean Spy, a citizen science platform designed to engage the public in marine research and exploration. With its focus on the Mediterranean Sea, this initiative invites enthusiasts, researchers, and everyday citizens to uncover the mysteries of one of the world’s most fascinating and diverse marine environments: the deep sea. In this project, 9 months of images have been recorded by a small crawler called BathyBot, deployed at 2450m depth at the EMSO-LO station.
EMSO-LO (European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water-column Observatory) is a site of the EMSO network, located in the Ligurian Sea, part of the Mediterranean Sea. It focuses on long-term monitoring of oceanographic and environmental processes, studying marine ecosystems, climate change impacts, ocean circulation, and geological activity.
BathyBot’s images are visualized into the Mediterranean spy application and citizens can identify several categories of organisms on each picture (from sea cucumber to sharks). The extensive number of images analyzed by citizen scientists is aggregated and analyzed by marine biologists. By harnessing the collective effort of volunteers and researchers, the project aims to gather crucial data on marine species monitoring, their behavior, and their habitat conditions, supporting scientific research. This initiative not only fosters a greater understanding of the Mediterranean’s ecological dynamics but also empowers the public to contribute to scientific research, raising awareness and engagement.
Ready to embark on your Mediterranean Spy mission? Dive in today!
To learn more about Mediterranean Spy and how you can participate, visit https://ocean-spy.ifremer.fr/mediterranean-spy/.
BathyBot is a project led by the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography (MIO – CNRS) and the Division Technique de L’INSU (DT-INSU – CNRS). Ocean Spy is a project led by Ifremer (BEEP) and Mediterranean Spy by the MIO-CNRS and Ifremer.
Figure : Mediterranean Spy citizen science platform provides a set of animal detection in order to increase automatic detection using artificial intelligence. Credits: CNRS/Ifremer