AT-20-02C: Atlantic Marine Assessment Program for Protected Species (AMAPPS) III C—Photogrammetric Aerial Surveys to Improve Detection and Classification of Seabirds, Cetaceans, and Sea Turtles
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are in the process of conducting high-resolution aerial imagery surveys under the Atlantic Marine Assessment Program (AMAPPS). The objective of AMAPPS is to provide baseline data on regional and seasonal species abundance and distribution in the nearshore and offshore environments to aid decision-making concerning offshore development, transportation, military exercises, and conservation. The AMAPPS collaboration has entered its third phase. The overarching goal of this third phase is to develop cost-efficient remote sensing- and machine learning-based methods to survey and monitor marine birds and other wildlife to improve the quality of population estimates and distribution mapping while enhancing personnel safety. BOEM is seeking subject matter experts to classify seabirds, marine mammals and other marine wildlife to the lowest taxonomic level in aerial imagery. The primary objective of this segment of AMAPPS is to enlist expertise in marine wildlife species identification through the Cooperative Environmental Studies Units (CESU) program to classify detected wildlife targets in imagery collected by AMAPPS to an appropriate taxonomic level utilizing remote access to an imagery annotation tool developed at USGS-UMESC and implementing the annotation quality control workflow developed by USGS-UMESC, BOEM, and USFWS.