Vital seafloor habitats were injured by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. NOAA and partners are building a network of experts and resources to restore this underexplored area in the Gulf of Mexico.

 

The sun is powerful, but its intensity dwindles as it passes through the depths of the sea. Yet even the ocean’s dim middle reaches—the “mesophotic zone”—and its deepest, sunlight-free areas—the “deep sea”—host an abundance of life. In the dim mesophotic zone, seafloor communities include deep-sea corals and animals such as fish, sea anemones, sponges, and sea cucumbers. Sunlight-free deep benthic communities also host corals and other forms of life such as sea stars, sea urchins, fish, and crabs.

 

In the effort to the map these seafloor communities, the MDBC project is exploring the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a method for automatically localizing and labeling specific species of coral within the thousands of hours of ROV videos collected. Creating bounding boxes around species of coral is a crucial step in training an AI to automate the process of labeling and identifying coral species in future videos, and we're asking for your help to achieve this goal. Through Click-a-Coral, we're asking for assistance in building a training data set to train an AI specific to this task. This AI can be a valuable tool for researchers and conservationists working on projects like the Mesophotic and Deep Benthic Communities (MDBC) Restoration Project, helping to analyze Big (Ocean) Data faster than any human ever could!