discussion / AI for Conservation  / 15 August 2022

Underwater Fish Datasets from the Mediterranean

Hi Wildlabs,

I am Sebastian the project manager for FishID. We are currently in the last stretch of DevOps for the FishID platform. I am hoping this awesome network can help me on my hunt for a fish dataset in the Mediterranean. I have already tried all the key websites like Fishial, Global Archive, FathomNet, VIAME, lila. I have also contacted key researchers and have done an extensive literature search. I haven't had much luck.

If the dataset is annotated (i.e., BBOX or masks) that would be great, but at this stage, we are simply looking for several 1 hr long videos. 

The purpose of FishID, similar to VIAME, BIIGLE or TATOR, is to make AI accessible to marine ecologists. 

 Hoping you can point me in the right direction :rocket:




The unusual suspects would be national repositories of scientific data, such as DANS in The Netherlands https://dans.knaw.nl/en/ . Not all countries have them, but many do. There also is https://zenodo.org/ which offers an international service 'as long as CERN exists'.

I am sure they contain datasets on fish, but you may have to put in work to find what you are looking for. For example, the datasets in national repositories may be described in national languages. One would expect a search engine that provides access to multiple national repositories, but to my knowledge, this does not yet exists ( in spite of it being already the third decade of the 21st century ). There is the EuroCRIS collaboration which seems to aim for this within Europe, but they are not yet advertising such a resource. They do offer https://dspacecris.eurocris.org/cris/explore/dris which is a world wide directory of research information systems. It may help you find the national repositories.

Finally, and frankly, I would not be too sure that you will find 1 hour long videos of fish in the Mediterranean. I am no expert on fish, but to me that seems pretty specific.

Hi Sebastian,

  How about using webcams, like this one in the Adriatic (if high enough detail): 

If not, it might be worth contacting https://reefish.umontpellier.fr/ who are based in Montpellier. They do marine research, (I think including some fish ID machine learning stuff too), so may have done work locally?

Cheers

Not sure if audio data would be of any use to you, but if so FishSounds has some - I just tried their search function and there is a location tag for 'Mediterranean & Black Sea'. 

You might try reaching out to the folks at Name that Fish, Innovasea, or perhaps an entity on the Fisheries Tech list would have Mediterranean stuff?