VIZ Tracking Project

Since the start of the VIZ - Sydney Diving Visibility Reports in 2019 we have been collecting reports of sightings on 10 target species with the goal of understanding their behaviour through time series.
Surely we are no scientists, we do it for fun, but we like to think we are contributing to the local knowledge. It's a significant investment of time, but it allows to preserve and share the information contained in the visibility reports. Without necessarily being aware, all our VIZ Group posters are enrolled into our project and what they see, or don't see, gets salvaged from the feed oblivion and placed into buckets with the intent of uncovering presence patterns.

These are the 10 species that we track by collecting the information contained in the visibility reports posted on VIZ.  The goal is to depict their presence with colors and for that, each species has a different metric that you can read in each graph's notes.

As we do local and empirical citizen science, we don't have the ambition to answer questions like why and where they migrate to, we leave that to real scientists, but we can surely contribute with a good view on what happens in our backyard, which is neglected by large scale research.

For Port Jacksons, Dusky Whalers and Giant Cuttlefish we have also started recording the water temperature in conjunction with sharp change in numbers (see in the graphs).

Check out the other derivate we produce from visibility reports: the Sea Turtle Tracking

To know more have a look at the FAQ.

The image below is a preview of the high resolution PDF file that you can download here