Although Taiwan is surrounded by the sea, based on Ocean Health Index, the score of Taiwan is lower than the global average. Because people take fishery resources for granted and are lack of understanding about the severe status quo of the marine ecosystem.

Then, how can we make Taiwanese realize this unsustainable situation and change their purchase behavior?

By creating the mobile web app Fish Checker, we want to assist Taiwanese can easily identify fish they are going to buy which is endangered or not, and make their purchasing decisions more sustainable.

Thanks to the effort of volunteers and users who have tried this app and collected thousands of pictures of fish in Taiwan to train AI machine learning, the accuracy of pattern recognition has been over 80% (Fish types in Taiwanese market).

The app development and first-stage promotion fee are under $USD 4,000.

Taiwanese love fish, people catch, sell, buy, and eat a lot of fish, but people don't know many of them are now endangered. Over the decades, there are more than 100 fish species vanished around northern Taiwan.

The worst of all, Taiwanese keep consuming endangered fish because people cannot see which fish are endangered.

As an opinion magazine which has promoted sustainable food culture to Taiwanese, Taiwan Edible Magazine needed to do something to fix this unsustainable situation.

We decided to develop a brand-new tool by using Cloud Vision and AI machine learning technology to help consumers easily differentiating endangered fish and making more sustainable purchasing decisions.

We have kept on optimizing Fish Checker web app's accuracy by inviting more and more users to try the App to establish the image database of endangered fish in Taiwan.

Through the collaboration with Taiwan Ocean University, the web app plans to be used by professors and students for the lectures also researches.

Besides, we were interviewed by National Fishery Radio Station to introduce Fish Checker and how it attribute to the society, and invited to cooperate with National Geographic Ocean Day event to promote fish conservation, and held sustainable seafood classroom activities in elementary schools.

Currently, this app mainly deals with fishes living near Taiwan. But by modifying this and expanding the area, we believe we can change people's behavior and, save the whole ecosystem of the ocean all over the world.

We developed the mobile web app Fish Checker with pattern recognition function in Taiwan. By just following 3 simple steps: Scan, Show & Share, users can easily check the fish are endangered or not.

Step 1: Scan

After scanning the fish, the app automatically matches the fish figure and the fish data in the database.

Step 2: Show

The result shows whether the fish are Endangered, Nearly Endangered or OK to eat. According to the result, users can make more ocean-friendly purchase decisions.

Step 3: Share

Users can share the result through social media to spread the fact of the endangered fish.