You may have noticed that for the past few months Floating Forests has only been serving up California images. The Tasmania images that we were analyzing last year have been offline due to some image quality issues. However, thanks to a lot of hard work by the Zooniverse team and power user/image processing magician Briana Harder we are happy to announce that the Tasmania images are back! Not only are the image quality issues fixed, Briana has helped us implement an algorithm to filter out cloudy images and images that don’t contain any coastline (see upcoming post for more details). As a result, hopefully you will be spending less time skipping bad images and more time outlining those beautiful kelp forests!

Less of this…

and more of this!

We have also improved the way in which we obtain images from USGS/NASA. This will make it easier for us to introduce data from other regions, so expect to see some images from Baja California, Chile, South Africa, and other temperate coastlines soon.

In the meantime, have fun with these Tasmania images. We’ve already started to document some major declines in kelp abundance in Tasmania over the past few decades thanks to your classifications. We are eager to obtain a better picture of these changes, but we need your help!