Spotting Giant Sea Bass Project

All giant sea bass encounters submitted to Spotting Giant Sea Bass up to December 31, 2023.

Overview:
The Spotting Giant Sea Bass Project was established in 2016 by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to collect community-sourced photos of giant sea bass, Stereolepis gigas, primarily from the recreational diving community. These images are then used to identify individual giant sea bass by analyzing their unique spot patterns through machine learning algorithms. The active dataset comprises encounters dating from 1997 through 2023, ranging from Half Moon Bay to the U.S.-Mexico border, with the vast majority of encounters occurring within the Southern California Bight. This dataset is updated annually.

Contents:
Each submitted encounter contains metadata for further analysis. Information that was not required upon submission is noted as optional and may be missing from some encounters.

Marked Individual: The identification name of the individual giant sea bass encountered. If there is no ID, the encounter was unidentifiable.
Year Collected: The year the individual was encountered.
Month Collected: The month the individual was encountered.
Day Collected: The day the individual was encountered.
Time of Day: The hour and minute of the encounter. If blank, the submitter did not include this detail (optional).
Location ID: The aggregated name of a given dive site. If no name is provided, it indicates an uncommon dive site not included in the drop-down list when submitting an encounter on the website.
Locality: The name of the location where the individual was encountered (optional).
Longitude: The longitude coordinates of the encounter.
Latitude: The latitude coordinates of the encounter.
Encounter Depth: The depth at which the encounter occurred (optional).
Behavior: The reported behavior of the individual during the encounter (optional).
Life Stage: The life stage of the individual.
Notes: Any additional information provided by the submitter about the encounter (optional).
Keywords: Various image keywords added by researchers during the identification process (e.g., right side image, left side image, fin split, hook).
Catalog Number: A unique identifier assigned to each encounter.

Funding:
This project is funded by the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory and the Aquarium of the Pacific.

Contact:
Molly Morse serves as the contact person for this living dataset.