Oxford looking for voluntary penguin counters
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London (dpa) - If you have a passion for watching animals, the University of Oxford and other organisations are looking for you.
Oxford is seeking volunteers to annotate images of penguins, chicks and eggs as part of the Penguin Watch initiative.
Fifty cameras record images from the Antarctic Peninsula and the Southern Ocean, overlooking colonies of penguins.
In order to properly observe the colonies, the scientists must know exactly what is on the images.
Oxford is working to develop a recognition tool by which computer scan automatically count every penguin individual by image.
But humans must count them first - comfortably in front of a computer.
The goal of the project is to study the effects of climate change, fishing industry and other disturbances by humans.
The organisations doing the study still need the data to determine the effects. Therefore they installed the 50 cameras to shoot between eight and 96 pictures a day.
The initiative is part of the Penguin Lifeline project, which has been fighting for animal protection since 2009.
