The team was provided with a platform to update and implement new design changes to the original website for a project led by Dr. Francesco Ferretti, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation. His research interests include studying the impact of humanity on the Earth’s oceans and conservation efforts. The website is built using WordPress with frontend CSS and HTML. RShiny provides the backend support to implement the Validation Monitor. We were tasked with converting the static framework of the website to a more dynamic and responsive framework and with improving on the current gamification scheme through a refined point rewards system and incentives.

The team was able to refine the current point reward system by integrating functionalities that will motivate users to validate sharks and support SharkPulse’s research for the ecology and taxonomy of shark populations. These functionalities include awarding users who are able to recognize rare shark species, and if the shark species are labeled as “endangered” or “vulnerable” or “critically endangered” according to the IUCN red lists of ecosystems and threatened species. Most of the completed changes were on the backend for the validation monitor and on the frontend for the identification guide. The team has also improved the identification guide to be a more suitable web page to educate users about sharks. It was updated by adding more questions and adding an option to let the users select “I can’t see” if they are unable to see shark characteristics from an image. Overall, the backend changes for assigning points based on if the user recognizes rare or threatened species is deployed. However, the project is still not complete, as the website still needs to be updated from being a static website to being a dynamic one. The rare species functionality could also be updated to improve the program’s performance.