Tom Hart

Penguinologist

My research centres around how to monitor penguins and other marine predators in difficult environments such as Antarctica. Many of the most important environments on the planet are too data deficient to understand the changes occurring there, and the implications for global change, which in turn stalls effective management. I spend a lot of time developing tools and techniques to scale up monitoring of, and data gathering from, these environments. This includes working with machine learning specialists, to develop algorithms to speed up data processing (such as our computer vision algorithm, Pengbot!).

You can help my research by taking part in Penguin Watch and Seabird Watch – citizen science projects on the Zooniverse platform. You’ll be shown images of penguin or seabird colonies captured by our remote time-lapse cameras, and asked to label the individuals as adults, chicks etc. Don’t worry, you don’t need expert knowledge – and be warned, it can be highly addictive!