Detection of Common Starfish in Underwater Images from Sylt Outer Reef using YOLOv8

In 2023, bottom-contacting fishing gears were excluded from German marine NATURA 2000 sites. The exclusion also holds for scientific monitoring where usually traditional, bottomcontacting sampling techniques such as beam trawling were used. However, scientific monitoring will be required to investigate the potential recovery of the areas and thus to assess the effectiveness of the conservation measure. To this end, less invasive monitoring techniques such as underwater videos are increasingl