Internship Information
Internship Experiences
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Michelle Ruge
University of WA
Developed an image database for pictures taken by certified North Pacific Groundfish Observers.In the summer of 2010, I had the opportunity to work for the Fisheries Monitoring and Analysis Division’s (FMA) Observer program at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC) in Seattle, WA. During this time, I was able to develop an image database for the FMA Division using Portfolio 9.0 software. FMA pictures are taken while certified North Pacific Groundfish Observers are deployed on commercial fishing vessels and processing plants located in the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands, and the Gulf of Alaska. The observer program deploys over 300 observers in a year and many of them return with photos. These pictures need to be organized, renamed, cataloged and embedded.
In Portfolio, keywords and fields were created to make it easier to find photos of interest. Some of the most important images were the thousands of fish photos. A scientific name field was made and each fish image had its corresponding scientific name embedded into the photo. Another useful field was the photo ranking field that quantified the quality of the individual images. Each photo was ranked from 0-5, with 5 being higher quality images.
During this internship I worked closely with observer program staff, who taught me how to classify each image. Through the web base client, an online catalog, FMA and other AFSC staff will be able to search for archival image data. The benefits of this project include having images available for use by all AFSC staff for publications, outreach posters, conference presentations, agency brochures and web-pages. The FMA staff relies on these cataloged images for use in creating training materials for observers and fish identification lessons. -
I also had the opportunity to participate in a 3-week training course that is required by the FMA Division to become a certified North Pacific Groundfish Observer. During the course, I was able to improve my Alaskan groundfish specimen identification skills through lectures and laboratory time. I also joined the trainee’s in a tour of a commercial longline vessel to see the living conditions, sampling areas and designated observer sample stations, and the basic layout of these types of vessels that the observers are subjected to. During the third week of the training I practiced survival skills needed at sea by donning an immersion suit and practiced safety drills with the trainees in Lake Washington.
At the completion of my internship I developed a user manual for the FMA Division staff that describes the entire process from taking the photos from the Observers to archiving them in Portfolio. In addition I presented a talk at the intern symposium in August 2010.