Annotation of fish and shark imagery is currently collected by various research, management and academic institutions globally (+100,000’s hours of deployments) with varying degrees of standardisation and limited formal collaboration or data synthesis.
GlobalArchive.org is designed to be a centralised repository of fish and shark annotation data with design principles including ease of use, secure user access, flexible data import, and the collection of any sampling and image analysis information. To easily share and synthesise data we have implemented data sharing protocols, including Open Data and synthesis Collaborations, and a spatial map to explore global datasets and filter to create a synthesis.
We present a case study of how this on-line service, with the co-investment of the Australian Research Data Commons - Data Partnerships program, has enabled researchers to synthesise fish annotation data sets from baited remote underwater stereo-BRUVs (Harvey et al. 2021) to create national benchmarks (Bosch et al. 2021) useful for assessing management effectiveness (Goetze et al. 2021) of marine parks by providing a national context for historical monitoring data.