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Digging up the oceans' past

This interactive project wants to attract volunteers into “digging up the oceans’ past”. The main task concerns transcribing data and metadata of a chosen historical marine survey. In this case, for example, a report of two fish species from an expedition dating back in 1904-1910 in the Atlantic Ocean.

Historical biodiversity documents comprise an important link to the long-term data life cycle and provide useful insights on several aspects of biodiversity research and management.One of the main project’s goals is to better understand the ocean’s past, in order to predict the future of ocean life. In addittion volunteers will be introduced to scientific practises and concepts such as the (meta)data curation. There is an enormous amount of (meta)data waiting to become FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and citizen science data rescue is a promising resource towards this end. After a first test with the dataset previously mentioned, more historical datasets may be incorporated into the workflow of the project. Tutorials and Guides in English are provided to enhance this experience and general information about the overall project is given to the citizen scientists.

You are invited to contribute to the project here!

Digging up the oceans’ past’ is a crowdsourcing project of the zooniverse platform developed within the framework of EMODnet Biology Phase IV. The data generated from this initiative will be made available through OBIS.