Image description: Close-up shot of hands holding an angling rod. Photo by Laura Stanley / Pexels.

Weighing up to 100 kg and stretching the length of a dinner table, flapper skate are at the centre of one of the largest citizen-science projects in British waters. The Guardian recently reported how sea anglers in Scotland who campaigned for a legally mandated marine protected area off Oban and Mull are now providing crucial data on the flapper skate – a critically endangered species.

When the skate is released alive into the seas off western Scotland, anglers upload photos to a conservation database that is powered by artificial intelligence and a new mobile phone app. Up to 300 anglers are submitting data, converting their trophy photographs into scientific evidence. Some anglers have additionally been trained to scan the identification tags implanted on many skate.

That catch data, including the grid coordinates, is uploaded into a specially designed online database, known as Skatespotter. Run by the Scottish Association for Marine Science (Sams) near Oban and the conservation agency NatureScot, the database now holds records of almost 2,500 individual flapper skate, with 5,000 images. While originally every photograph was manually scanned and matched by the researchers, AI scanning is now accelerating efforts. The database also takes in skate identification data from as far north as Orkney and from a project in Northern Ireland. This new AI technique could be applied to other fish conservation projects, greatly increasing their efficiency and speed.

Marine conservationists and anglers believe that as a direct result of the protection offered by the Loch Sunart and Sound of Jura MPA, the species is recovering, nearly 20 years after it was put on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list because of decades of overfishing. A recent scientific paper by Dodd, her project partner Dr Steven Benjamins from Sams, and two colleagues in the Scottish government’s marine directorate found that the MPA had helped the species to rebound rapidly, with catches increasing by between 54% and 92% in different parts of the protected area.

A group of conservation charities comprising Open Seas, the Our Seas coalition and the umbrella body Scottish Environment LINK hope this evidence will be used by ministers in the devolved government in Edinburgh to strengthen Scotland’s MPA network.