Project Title: Advancing Deep-Sea Coral Video Identification
Goal or Purpose

To improve the taxonomic identification of deep-sea corals captured on videotape and develop regional photo databases of key species that can be used by future U.S. and international researchers.
Anticipated Management Application(s)

Underwater images and video now represent the primary source of information on the locations of deep-sea corals, but taxonomic identification without specimens in hand remains problematic.  The project enhances the capabilities by U.S. scientists to accurately identify deep-sea corals from video surveys and helps improve the comparability of datasets derived from video surveys by researchers from different countries.   If this small pilot is successful, NOAA hopes to expand the image database to include other regions in the future and serve the information on the web.
Fiscal Funding:
  • FY 2012 @ $5,000

 
Region(s):
  • International
 Location(s):
  •  None Defined.
Sample higher-level key for hexacorals. The genus and species-level descriptions will include in-situ imagery to aid identification in the field.
Project Type:
  • Data Mining
 Point of Contact: Office of the Point of Contact:
  • NMFS OHC
 Team Members:
  • Dr. Jamie Davies, IFREMER
Project Title: Advancing Deep-Sea Coral Video Identification
Methods/Approach

NOAA partnered with international collaborators at the French Marine Research Institute (IFREMER) and the University of Plymouth, UK to develop an image database catalog of in situ images of North Atlantic deep-sea corals with agreed and corrected taxonomic identifications for the corals and associated text descriptions and images suitable for identification of corals from image and video data.  The work builds upon an existing model for deep-sea taxa from waters of the United Kingdom (Howell & Davies, 2010).
Project Results and Management Outcomes

A final summary report was completed in January 2014. It contains example pages of the Image Catalog for North Atlantic Deep-Sea Corals. 
Project Title: Advancing Deep-Sea Coral Video Identification
Internal References:
  •  None Defined
 
Backlinks:
  •  None Defined

FY12_11_image.jpg
Sample higher-level key for hexacorals. The genus and species-level descriptions will include in-situ imagery to aid identification in the field.