Understanding and managing marine ecosystems requires data at scale across depths, jurisdictions, and time. The Fish Collective is an Australian-led, internationally connected network of scientists advancing precisely this goal through coordinated underwater imagery surveys using stereo-BRUVs, DOVs, and ROVs to monitor fish and shark assemblages across coastal and Commonwealth waters.
The Australian BRUV network has brought together 30,000 BRUV samples under a broad data sharing agreement to make this data available to researchers through The Fish Collective.
By unifying data standards and championing FAIR and CARE data principles, the Collective has built an infrastructure that transforms siloed survey efforts into a coherent national picture. Central to this is GlobalArchive — an AI-ready data repository enabling broad data sharing — and CheckEM, an open-source quality control toolkit that ensures annotation integrity across contributing institutions. We will give updates of how GlobalArchive can be used to archive, share and synthesise fish annotation data.
The Collective will be Governed by a Steering Committee drawing on expertise from research, monitoring, traditional knowledge and management organisations nationally, the Australian BRUV synthesis has already informed regional marine park planning, national biodiversity reporting, and international shark population studies.This data will directly support Australian State of Environment reporting, Marine Park assessments, and National Ocean Ecosystem Accounts.
We will share a series of lessons learned from survey design, QA-QC and analysis of data at regional and national scales.