To impart knowledge and skills on image analysis in Baited Remote Underwater Videos (BRUVs) among Q-quatics staff, Mr. Rodolfo ‘Rudy’ Reyes Jr. (Head of Species ID Team and Leader of the Underwater Video Image Analysis project with the University of Western Australia) conducted a seminar on “Identifying, Tagging and Measuring Animals in BRUVS videos” on Friday, 11 July 2019 at the IRRI Khush Hall Conference Room (Philippines). Late last December, Rudy was among the six Qq staff trained by experts from UWA, Prof. Jessica Meeuwig (Director of Marine Futures Lab) and Mr. Sean van Elden (Marine Futures Lab team member and Dr. Meeuwig’s PhD advisee) on BRUVs video processing.
In his presentation, Rudy initially discussed what information the team are after from this exercise i.e., species list, number of individuals for each species and average lengths for each species, as they are inputs/relevant to biodiversity and biomass. The steps involved in deriving these information are enumerated below:
- Identification and tagging of each species, the first time it appears in the video.
- Finding the frame with the most number of individuals (per species).
- Finding the frame with the most number of individuals (per species).
- Measuring the fork lengths of at least 10%.
Aside from physical traits such as body shapes, Rudy pointed out that behavioral analysis (i.e., tagging species that feed on the bait, chase other fishes etc.) is also helpful in species identification.
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Is it easy to do? There are two considerations, 1. technical (navigating around the software) and 2. species ID which given a clear video with not too many fishes that are swimming rather slowly, could be easy. At this point, Rudy showed samples of both clear and unclear videos and demonstrated the step by step work involved in identifying tagging and measuring the fishes.
Towards the end of the seminar, Rudy presented UWA’s feedback on the video processing work of Q-quatics followed by where the team is at in terms of deliverables. Dr. Mary Ann ‘Maan’ Bimbao, Qq Executive Director, gave a short background of the video processing project with UWA and mentioned the objectives of the management for taking on this task.
Members of the Qq Species ID Team (L – R): Michael Yap, Jeniffer Espedido, Luisa Abucay, Jeremy Jansalin, Rachel Atanacio, Rodolfo Reyes Jr., Selina de Leon and Fayte Sicnawa
