It's fair to say that with all the bad news we hear about the Great Barrier Reef, many of us are left feeling powerless to know what to do.

But a new project called Virtual Reef Diver, led by a collaborative team of scientists and featured by the ABC during Science Week, is calling for people all across Australia to help out — by classifying underwater reef images from their own loungerooms.

By volunteering your time to identify coral, algae or sand, you can help scientists get as much information as possible about the Great Barrier Reef.

Need another incentive? It's fun!

Coral or algae?

The first phase of the Virtual Reef Diver project askes people from across Australia to look at hundreds of thousands of photos from across the Great Barrier Reef, supplied by researchers from the XL CATLIN surveys from 2012 onwards.

Each image will have 15 randomly placed circles on it — and you just need to mark what is beneath each circle, said Queensland University of Technology (QUT) statistician Kerrie Mengersen.

"We're asking people to identify hard coral, soft coral, algae, sand and so on."

That information can then be turned into useful data, according to Erin Peterson, a spatial scientist from QUT and the project leader for Virtual Reef Diver.

"Behind the scenes, that data gets sucked into a model and we use that to make predictions of coral cover across the Great Barrier Reef," she said.

Each image will be classified many times, with the circles in different positions each time — so multiple people will end up providing data on different parts of the same images, giving a more comprehensive data set.

You never know what you'll see in Virtual Reef Diver ( ABC )

And because Virtual Reef Diver can be accessed from your laptop or phone anywhere with internet connection, geography is no restriction to who can participate.

"Anyone in Australia and anywhere around the world can get involved," Dr Peterson said.

The GBR is huge

At 2,300 kilometres long and covering 350,000 square kilometres, the Great Barrier Reef is bigger than Victoria and Tasmania combined, too big for scientists alone to cover.

And that's why the help of citizen scientists is so valuable.

It's hoped that the database will be able to be used by policy makers. ( ABC Science: Nick Kilvert )

"There's so much variability from north to south, and there's a lot of pressures on the reef, so we need a better snapshot of what's going on," Dr Peterson said.

"You can't manage something if you don't know it's there."

Virtual Reef Diver plans to increase the area of the reef that is monitored.

"There is a lot of diversity across the reef — different parts of the reef are declining, but some parts of the reef are improving," Professor Mengersen said.

"So if we're going to preserve the reef, we really need to know much more about it at that local level, and we can't get that information unless we have data from a wide range of areas."

Upload your images

While phase one of the project is already underway, phase two is still in production.

The second phase of the project will invite visitors to the Great Barrier Reef to upload their own photos to the system for analysis.

By creating this user-generated database, the total area of the Great Barrier Reef that can be photographed will be hugely expanded, which is crucial, according to Dr Mark Gibbs from QUT's Knowledge to Innovation Institute.

"[Current] methods take hundreds of hours underwater just to [survey] a little patch of reef. They just don't scale up," he said.

"There's tens of thousands of square kilometres of reef here. So doing 100 square metres at a time is just not going to get us there."

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Photographers don't need sophisticated diving gear or expensive underwater cameras.

Snorkelers can take photos on simple point-and-shoot cameras, with the ideal frame composition taking in a one-metre-square patch of reef.

And it makes sense to use the photos people take on holidays as a study resource, Professor Mengersen said.

"There are a lot of divers out there, diving on the reef and taking photos," she said.

"We can use the information from their photos and combine it with the information that we've got from the surveys to give us better models of the health of the reef for larger areas."

How will the data be used?

The classifications will be fed into models the scientific team have spent years building, tweaking and perfecting.

"If we have these photos then we can actually get a lot of information," Professor Mengersen said.

While the researchers are trying to monitor a huge area, there will inevitably also be gaps for which there aren't any photographs available.

"If there are gaps in some areas, then we can use our statistical models to [fill those in], but the more information we have the better those estimates will be," Professor Mengersen said.

The data will be able to be used to monitor the GBR. ( Supplied: The Ocean Agency / XL Catlin Seaview Survey )

As well as being able to get through a mountain of data, involving citizen scientists in the project can have other benefits as well, according to Professor Mengersen.

"It's a really good opportunity for people to become involved in the science, and in that way become involved in helping to manage the reef themselves," she said.

While the project is in its relative infancy, Dr Peterson hopes it can continue as an evolving resource that will help to inform better management in the future.