PENGUIN-SPOTTER is not a job you would normally expect to do in Oxford.
But people across the city are being urged to keep count of as many of the birds as they can.
Rather than waddling around the city’s streets, the birds are all in photos taken in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.
Oxford University’s ‘Penguin Watch’ needs volunteers to study 200,000 pictures taken by remote cameras in the field.
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Scientists hope the effort will teach computers how to recognise the birds, so they can track population levels more accurately across 30 colonies.
Project leader Dr Tom Hart said there were not enough researchers to trawl through all the pictures, so they had decided to use a ‘crowdsourcing’ method.
He said: “Because of the enormous amount of data available, we need volunteers to help us count them.
“The penguins should be fairly obvious to the human eye, so we don’t need experts to do this.
“We want loads of people to get involved, not just to help our research but so they can see what is going on with penguins at the moment.”
His research is focused on monitoring penguins and other marine animals in harsh environments such as Antarctica.
The university’s zoology department has been working with the Australian Antarctic Division on the project, which uses a network of over 50 automatic cameras to take photos of the birds.
Wildlife experts have warned some penguin species are declining because their food source – krill – is threatened by melting sea ice.
The ice is a habitat for algae the krill feed on and the knock-on effect has extended to penguins.
Scientists are now trying to learn more about penguin behaviour and breeding patterns, in the hope that it will help research into their decline and develop new conservation methods.
Users will be given a cursor on their computer screen shaped like a crosshair and be asked to click on the penguins they see in the pictures.
Dr Hart added: “Our cameras have taken time-lapse pictures and so we need people to point and click, picking out the penguins.
“It is quite simple but also quite addictive when you try it.
“ The data we collect will also improve how well the computer can recognise penguins. Eventually it should be able to do it without human help, although some things always need a human eye.”
Efforts are currently being focused on penguins, Oxford University said, but future research could also track other seabirds.
For information or to take part visit penguinwatch.org
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