Aerial Survey Imagery Notice of Intent

Background
The US Geological Survey (USGS) intends to award a contract to Conservation Metrics in Santa Cruz, CA for the purpose of Sea Duck Detection from Aerial Survey Imagery. This initiative aims to develop a standardized digital aerial survey methodology to improve safety, data consistency, and model accuracy in evaluating sea duck populations along the Pacific Flyway.

The project addresses the challenges associated with traditional observer-based aerial surveys, which have raised concerns regarding safety, expense, and methodological consistency. The Pacific Flyway is critical for sea ducks but has proven difficult to survey due to logistical and safety issues. The contract will leverage unique proprietary code and machine learning pipelines developed by Conservation Metrics to produce standardized data products tailored to the project's needs.

Work Details
The work involves several key objectives:
1) Identify Bird Presence: In the first two years, the vendor will process aerial images collected by USGS and collaborators using a pre-existing seabird detection CNN model. They will identify images containing birds and annotate them with bounding boxes for further analysis.

2) Modify Existing Model: The vendor will retrain the seabird model using annotated sea duck images acquired during the project to create a sea duck-specific CNN model. This retraining will continue into years two and three with new imagery.

3) Evaluate Model Performance: The vendor will train multiple models on revised datasets and evaluate their performance in collaboration with USGS. They will also implement a new sea duck model to quantify abundances in specific regions such as Puget Sound and San Francisco Bay. Deliverables include processed images with annotations, an updated image library, final model workflows, code, and evaluation metrics.

Period of Performance
September 16, 2024 - December 31, 2027

Place of Performance
Work will be conducted in an external independent lab facility.