Dennis Parraga

I had the opportunity to help researchers understand penguin population changes and shifts in their survival rates and breeding timing of two Rockhopper penguin colonies on Isla de los Estados, in the Southern tip of Argentina. This was done remotely through the website zooniverse in a project named “Penguin Watch”. Within this project, researchers send over Timelapse photos from those islands for volunteers to help identify the number of penguins to better understand their behavior. I also helped examine underwater photos of wild beluga whales and help us identify the age, sex, and group size in a separate research project called “Beluga Bits”within the same website. Overall I had completed 500 classifications which amount to about 12 hours of volunteered work towards both causes.

Amazing opportunity to ask questions to UMD students and further prepare myself on the transfer process.

I've got the amazing opportunity to contribute to a cause that contributes to a cause that could help the world, thanks to the amazing platform of Zooniverse.org. Zooniverse is a platform for people-powered research where research on biology, nature, climate, etc, is made possible through the help of volunteers such as myself. The research I helped with was the Killer Whale Count project, initiated by Alexa Hasselman, which is a project that deals with identifying and counting killer whales in the Aleutian Islands. This project helps researchers assess the impact of killer whale predation pressure on many wildlife, like the steller sea lion, around the western range of the islands. The reason for the research is to shine a light on the drastic decline that the Steller sea lion population faces around the western region of the islands, which has led to the species being enlisted as threatened. For this reason, I am contributing to a cause that will help the researchers find a solution that can asses the role that killer whale predation pressure has on the endangered western stock of Steller sea lions. I have completed 500 contributions to their study which is equivalent to 10 hours of service contributed to the cause. I am glad to have participated in a project that aims to protect the endangered life of a threatened species and plan on contributing to other similar causes as well.