White Sharks on Sharkbook – Additional ID Areas

What Wildbook should this feature be in?

Sharkbook

What would you like to see?

I’m helping Nikki Ladd (@nladd) and the Shark Experience team in New Zealand to submit their white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) encounters. It looks like machine learning has been implemented for dorsal fin IDs on the species, but we would like to incorporate other areas that are more useful for ID from underwater photos.

An example of the ID areas that Shark Experience (and other groups worldwide) use for white sharks is here:

How would this functionality help you?

Adding additional ID areas would improve functionality of Sharkbook for identifying white sharks from underwater photos.

Hey @simonjpierce , thanks for the request. I’m going to tag @jason because, as far as I know, these sort of ML requests, where we’re talking about all new part recognition, require a significant amount of data management and effort. I think it will be best for Jason to make determinations about this particular question.

Thanks so much!
Tanya

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Thanks @tanyastere! I know @jason was playing around with tiger sharks a while back, which have some overlap in ID areas, so I’m hoping that expanded capability for white sharks might have multi-species applicability.

Jason, the NZ white shark team have ~200 identified individuals. There’s overlap with the eastern Australian population – marker-tagged sharks from Australia routinely show up, and sat-tagged NZ sharks often head over there too.

I’m going to the White Sharks Global conference in South Australia in November, so it’ll be a good opportunity to talk to other teams about the potential net benefit of a regional or international photo-ID database.