Explore the Seafloor is an online citizen science project undertaken by ABC Science in conjunction with the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) as part of National Science Week 2013.

Throughout the month of August we’ll be asking for help with identifying kelp and sea urchins in images of the seafloor. This job is normally done by research assistants and is time-consuming and laborious. In Explore the Seafloor we’ll be taking a crowd-sourcing approach to reduce this workload and ask regular folk to get involved and help the scientists with their research work.

This crowd-sourcing approach is called citizen science – it’s about using the power of the people to increase the breadth of science by gathering or processing information important to a scientific project.

Anyone can join in, you don’t need to be a scientist, you just need to have access to the internet and want to help.