Back at the lab my first  job was to sort each of the pitfall traps, separating ants from other critters and debris using a microscope and a couple of dissecting needles. Considering some species were approximately the size and colour of a grain of sand, this was not always the epitome of fun. One trap had 781 individual ants in it. My supervisor, an entomologist and ant enthusiast, helped with the identification. At one point he sternly called across the lab, “Tracey… why is this ant in three pieces?”

From the data collected I was able to report on the composition of ant communities, suggest indicator species, and interpret ecological health of the sites.

Fast forward to 2015 and, like so much environmental data, this useful plethora of ant information was sitting on a hard drive doing nothing. I may be biased but I like to think all that effort should deliver more than a standalone report. I wanted the data to be available as a baseline for future studies, and the only way to do that was to make it publicly available. Ant data is particularly valuable as not only are ants a tremendous indicator species, but invertebrate data can be scarce as it generally requires experts to identify species.

I cleaned and formatted the data for upload into Gaia Resources’ Biological Data Recording System (BDRS) and created a project page in the Citizen Science Hub. As a result, not only was my data now publicly available but users could visualise it on a webmap and pull out customised shapefiles and spreadsheets.  Using QGIS, I created, among other things, a map of species richness and abundance of Iridomyrmex chasei – the genus of which is renowned for its dominance in disturbed areas thus making it a good indicator of ecological health (such as in Bisevav & Majer 1999, Hoffman & Andersen 2003, and Andersen et al. 2004).

Figure 1: Sample of abundance map for Iridomyrmex chasei.

The compulsory fields in the BDRS ensure that each data point is accompanied by a geocode, datestamp and species name, which means that the data can be shared across a wider range of groups using some of the international data standards that the BDRS supports.  In addition, my study could even be replicated – apart from those sites that are now sitting in one of the wards of Fiona Stanley Hospital! The original report can be found here as supporting documentation for anyone that loves ants so much that they would like to replicate my study in full and has a spare lifetime to identify the ant species.

This is an example of how historic, local data can be made publicly available and hence useful for biodiversity snapshots, baseline data and future comparisons. If you would like more information on the 2010 study or would like to upload data of your own, please contact me, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Tracey

REFEERENCES

Andersen, A., Fisher, A., Hoffman, B., Read, J. & Richards, R. (2004). Use of terrestrial invertebrates for biodiversity monitoring in Australian rangelands, with particular reference to ants. Austral Ecology. Blackwell Science Ltd. 29: 87-92.

Bisevav, L. & Majer, J. (1999). Comparative study of ant communities of rehabilitated mineral sands mines and heathland, Western Australia. Restoration Ecology 7(2): 117-126.

Hoffman, B. & Andersen, A. (2003). Responses of ants to disturbance in Australia, with particular reference to functional groups. Austral Ecology 28: 444-464.

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Kangaroo Island / Victor Harbor Dolphin Watch is a volunteer community project in partnership with Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC), that gathers information on the population of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp.) and common dolphins (Delphinus delphis) found around the peninsulas of South Australia. This longitudinal project was developed by Tony and Phyll Bartram in conjunction with Dr Mike Bossley AM of WDC.

The group have been recording data for some time, and recently sent through a data file containing all of their historical sightings. Tracey and I have just added all this archival data into the Citizen Science hub, using the bulk loading tools, to present a more complete picture of the diversity around their coastal waters.  You can interact with their data on the new Citizen Science Hub project page (or click on the image below).

A snapshot of observations in the Kangaroo Island and Victor Harbor area

For current and ongoing records, the team at Kangaroo Island utilises the existing Coastal Walkabout mobile app to capture a range of mostly marine mammal observations in their region of South Australia. This utilises the BDRS repository we run under the Hub – from which their volunteer submissions can be managed and visualised.  They’ve also been supporters of the Coastal Walkabout app for a long time – going as far as to promote it around their area with large signs and support from local businesses, like the Sealink Ferry.

Coastal Walkabout signage on the Sealink Ferry (image courtesy Phyll Bartram)

For more information on our Citizen Science Hub, or how we can assist you in setting up your own project, feel free to call me (+61 8 9227 7309), drop me an email, or start a conversation on Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter with us.

Alex

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Simultaneously, a related article in the Australasian Plant Conservation Network journal was published. Both these papers discussed the information technology underpinning citizen science engagement in monitoring Marri decline syndrome identified as being caused by two related fungal pathogens.  Specifically, the papers covered the development and utilisation of The Marri App and also the key role of Gaia Resources’ Biological Data Recording System, and both these papers were co-authored by colleagues from the Centre of Excellence for Climate Change Woodland and Forest Health at Murdoch University.

The two papers references are:

Alex R. Chapman, Trudy Paap, Cielito Marbus, Treena Burgess and Giles Hardy (2015). Utilising Citizen Science: communities monitoring Marri Canker incidence. Australasian Plant Conservation 24(1): 2-4.

Chapman AR, Paap T, Marbus C, Burgess TI and Hardy GESJ (2015). Utilising Citizen Science to Monitor Corymbia calophylla (Marri) Canker Incidence and Severity. Australasian Plant Pathology Conference Proceedings, Fremantle WA. paper powerpoint

It was also great to see Tilo Massenbauer from South Coast NRM give a talk about the Dieback Information Delivery and Management System (DIDMS), which is very much related to our work in the citizen science space.  The DIDMS system is based on our Geographic Reporting and Information Database (GRID) product (more on that product can be found here), and Piers and Tilo are presenting today on the same topics for a presentation with the WALIS group.

Tilo giving his talk about DIDMS at the APPS Conference

There’s a lot of interest in citizen science lately, and with Piers, James and Tracey heading to the State NRM Conference next week, you’ll also be hearing a lot more about GRID in the blog shortly!

Alex

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Gaia Resources were one of the gold sponsors for the conference, and we also pitched in to help run the event – Alex prepared and supported two posters (one on our new Citizen Science Hub, and another on the BDRS), while I presented a talk (embedded below, or available on Slideshare), ran the second workshop and helped run one of the Saturday workshops on technology usability.  It was a very busy conference for us, because in amongst that we also spoke to heaps of clients, collaborators, and a lot of new and energetic faces.

My talk on factors for success in citizen science

For me, the highlight of the first day was the success of workshop two, on data collection and management. My co-chairs (John la Salle and Luigi Ceccaroni) had given me free reign, so I took a risk with the format.  It totally paid off with the passion and enthusiasm that the delegates brought to the fore. The five talks I had selected to open the session were all well delivered and really gave the delegates the overview I was hoping for – why we need to collect data, the emergence of a project based data standard, two large projects (one is spatial extent and data, the other in time), and finally a reminder that people want to use (and cite) the data.  After a Question and Answer session, I took a deep breath and jumped.

The Q&A Session in Workshop Two

In the second hour of the workshop my aim was to engage the audience to explain the challenges and opportunities that were to be found in data collection and management, using the DataOne data life cycle model to pick out the “Collect”, “Preserve” and “Integrate” steps. After a brief explanation, I asked a lecture theatre of 210 people to work with their neighbours to come up with three challenges and opportunities for each. After 15 minutes or so of roaming the room with my co-chairs, I brought up a document and started to type… and type… and type… I type pretty fast, but I was hard pressed to keep up with the shouts coming from the audience.

Trying to keep up with the influx of ideas in Workshop Two

The full list of all the answers is here, but I’ve also taken that and Wordled it below… one for challenges and one for opportunities.

Challenges

Opportunities

It’s pretty interesting just to look at these two Wordles, especially given the great big commonality of data (which was so often cited, Wordle included it twice in each) – but that’s worthy of something a bit more than just this overview.  I’m working on how to write this up into some sort of a report as well, so stay tuned for that.

I don’t think I’ve been happier to see a risk pay off and I’m working on both a report on this workshop, and a paper around these challenges and opportunities to submit to the nascent Journal of Citizen Science, something Alex and I found out more about after the Saturday sessions in an international meeting.  That meeting was another highlight, which I’ll get to in a second. Anyway, workshop two went better than I expected,  and the importance of BBQs in citizen science was finally recognised.

Day Two saw us being delegates once again, and there were quite a few highlights here – the vote to go ahead with the incorporation of the Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA, pronounced “axe-ah” it seems), the election of the management committee and the understanding that ACSA has funding ready to start working on initiatives was a great start to the day. It got better as we heard from various speakers around their projects and other areas – there was much inspiration to be found throughout the day (helped by the doughnut balls at afternoon tea).

The final day I attended all four of the workshops. Although they were a bit ragged, they had plenty of enthusiasm. I helped Paul Flemons run the technology usability workshop by firstly giving a talk about the software engineering process (showing the difference between the waterfall and agile methodologies), with a focus on what you need to do as clients (not “users”).  Then Paul had a prepared exercise ready to go, where delegates broke up into groups, chose a use case, and prepared a list of requirements, designed the workflow for their use case, and even got to sketching out a rough design for the app (thanks to a handy whiteboard!)

Our whiteboard (seriously, I think I have an addiction to whiteboards)

This was a new experience for many of the people in the group I was with, but they went along with the process, and at the end all four groups came back to present their elevator pitch (and suddenly I found myself being an impromptu mime in an elevator). This was quite fun, and a good way to end this session.  You now also have the origins of the BBQ, doughnuts, and elevator hashtags you will have seen in the Twitter feed…

After these four workshops, the new ACSA management committee had invited the international delegates and a few of us with experience in international projects (Paul Flemons as the Oceania representative of TDWG, and Alex and I for our past experiences with TDWG and OGC) to discuss potential collaboration,  the new Journal of Citizen Science, and interoperability and collaboration generally between ACSA, and their European and American counterpart organisations. It was a pretty productive discussion, in that we might have some more Australians on the editorial board, plans for an interoperability working group, and a few other initiatives that the new ACSA management committee will be working on.

It’s pretty hard to sum up the conference in a blog post as to all the things we learned… so in the end I didn’t try.  I think I can speak for Alex by saying that the conference was one of the best experiences we’ve had and it was exhausting.  We had some time on Sunday to decompress and write out our thoughts before coming home.  I think we wrote out about three pages of bullet points to work with, and I think we’re going to be working on this for a while to come… and yet, I can’t wait for the next one.

Piers

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We’ve been supporting the ACSA since inception here by providing free hosting for the ACSA web site, and I’ve been involved in the first workshop they held in Brisbane (see our blog for details of that past workshop).  We’ve also been involved in the setting up of the organisation, and this conference will be a great start to the new Association, and we’re looking forward to supporting it into the future, as well.

At the conference, Alex and I will be giving three presentations – two posters and a paper – and one of the main ones we will be focusing on is the launch of our new Citizen Science Hub, now live at http://citizensciencehub.archive.gaiaresources.com.au/ (or http://tinyurl.com/citscihub if you prefer something shorter).

The aim of this hub is to provide a place to celebrate our citizen science projects and to provide more ways for the community to engage with scientists, and vice versa.  Our role here is as an enabler; where we provide the solutions to help this engagement happen – be they mobile apps, the Biological Data Recording System (BDRS), WordPress plugins, training, hosting, ongoing support or program design assistance.

The new Citizen Science Hub website has been set up to help connect participants with projects, such as the ones we support, including:

• Bunbury Dolphin Discovery Centre,
• Coastal Walkabout,
• Discovery Circle,
• Dolphin Watch,
• Marri Canker, and
• Prawn Watch.

We’re also working on a few other projects at the moment, which will appear and be added to in the future.

We run a range of different internal citizen science projects, which we’ve also added to the Hub site.  When we add these, it increases the volume of data quite considerable (looking at my own bird records, there’s a fair bit of time already invested there across the 17,000+ records I’ve logged!).

The records in the hub – click on the image to go to the Participate page to investigate

We also aim to connect up the scientists and project proponents with the communities, and with the technologies to help this happen.  We remain an independent solution provider so that we can put together the best tools for the projects at hand, and are looking at a range of existing and emerging technologies across the globe to better serve our clients.  Our role as an enabler means we sit between the citizens and the scientists, and make sure the technology solutions meet the needs of both.

Importantly, we’ve aimed to keep the data free and open for people to use.  Our projects have been more than happy to share data between them, and to contribute to this larger pool of data.  Once we get the Atlas of Living Australia to harvest this data, it will be sent on to that repository, and from there to the international community including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

Over the course of the next three days at the ACSA Conference, Alex and I will be presenting, running workshops, posting our thoughts all across social media (for once, I might actually be using my Twitter account!), and generally having a ball meeting with everyone across the citizen science space.

Stay tuned for more announcements regarding the Hub and our work in this area.

Piers

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Prawn Watch is a citizen science project run by the Swan River Trust’s River Guardians program aimed at increasing the community’s understanding of prawns in Western Australia’s Swan and Canning rivers. The Prawn Watch app allows the prawning community to simply record and upload catch data to a River Guardians database. This information will then be assessed by the researchers and the results will contribute to the long-term sustainable conservation aims of the project.

What’s New in Version 1.0.3

We have upgraded the site information form so that when making a new observation you can record depth as a decimal number (rather than whole metres). Also, the specific catch method you are using can be selected from a drop-down box.

The ‘My Records’ map screen will now show the four Prawn Watch zones:  Zone 1 – Upper Swan Estuary; Zone 2 – Middle Swan Estuary; Zone 3 – Lower Swan Estuary; and Zone 4 – Canning Estuary.

They will be coloured to indicate the total number of prawns that have been recorded in that zone since the beginning of the current prawning season (1st November each year). This ‘heat-map’ represents the total number of prawns in 5 bands on a logarithmic scale: orange 0-9; blue 10-99; yellow 100-999; red 1000-9999; and purple >10000 records.

Each time you visit this screen the app will refresh the data from the server to display the latest heat-map of total prawn counts for the current season. Any submitted observations you have previously made are also represented on the map by a purple prawn icon; if you click on the prawn icon, you can see the date and time that you made the observation.

Screenshots from the Mobile app

This season’s data submissions can be viewed on our interactive map.  For more information check out the original launch post, contact me via email, or drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter.

Alex

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A primary goal of the conference was to give attention to developing or refining criteria for the identification of globally important marine mammal areas (IMMA’s) and to address the challenges and strategies of managing very large and very small marine mammal protected areas.

I attended four sessions/workshops:

• Public Engagement: Expanding Constituencies of Support by Reaching Wider Audiences
• Wildlife Interpretation and Education: connecting with marine mammals and their habitats
• Protecting Spinner Dolphin Resting Areas
• Citizen Science and Important Marine Mammal Areas

It was the last which was the primary impetus for attending as Coastal Walkabout collaborator Professor Lars Bedj3r from Murdoch Universities Cetacean Research Institute was presenting the latest analyses of citizen science engagement and experience (a paper which Piers is a co-author on).

Lars presenting at ICMMPA3

The case study ‘Is Citizen Science effective in informing candidate IMMA’s?’ compared 6 months of dolphin observations in the Swan-Canning River Park (SCRP) from both traditional (TS) and citizen science (CS) sources. The CS data was sourced from the Dolphin Watch initiative while the TS data came from a small team of researchers at Murdoch Uni.

Comparative data captured between March – August 2014 included:

• TS provided 67 hours of observational effort compared with 1342 hours from CS
• TS observed 259 dolphins while CS saw 1150 dolphins
• TS was confined to on-water observations over 12/33 zones in the River Park while CS covered 32/33 zones

Initial results from the case study suggest that:

• TS provides a deeper level of scientific observations than CS
• CS provides a greater quantity of observations both in terms of effort and spatial distribution
• CS can inform on cIMMA’s but requires continuous and repeated training and a high level of engagement

The authors concluded that CS can make scientific, conservation and educational contributions to research in partnership with specialist scientists.

There were also a number of existing users of the Coastal Walkabout app (get it on iTunes, Google Play) in attendance and a good deal of interest from attendees in the application of smartphone apps to enhance their citizen science initiatives around the country and extending into the Pacific.

Contact me directly if you want to know more, via email, or leave a comment below.

Alex

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Social media harvesting

Previously, you might recall we ran an experiment of harvesting observations of mole crickets from Twitter.  Initially we were just using this for a test of technology, but I also ran a bit of an experiment about how engagement drives your data volumes, as well.  You can read up on this on the following posts:

• Initial call for data and explanation – https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/mole-crickets/
• One month in – https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/mole-crickets-revisited/
• And the engagement summary – https://archive.gaiaresources.com.au/engaging-with-mole-crickets/

Well, we’ve just done a bit more of a revamp on our social media harvester, and this is because the mole crickets around my area are starting up their calling again, so I wanted to start doing some more recordings.  I even picked one up last week in the backyard..

Another mole cricket sighting!

I’ve been using Hootsuite lately for Twitter posting, and I’ve realised from my latest post that I have to do a bit more tuning for the GPS accuracy in the settings – I’ve switched recently to a new Samsung S5 (and a Gear 2, which is where this photo comes from above).  In any case, we’re up to 98 sightings of the mole cricket through this experiment, covering a lot of my own records around Perth, but a few from more widespread locations (including an “absence” record from the middle of Western Australia, thanks Judy!).

The mole cricket survey got out a bit, through articles like this one from Science Network WA.  I got known by a few people as “the mole cricket guy”, much to my chagrin.  Interestingly, we had a few people volunteer sightings through email and our Facebook page, although there were some cases where people weren’t happy to provide locations (but others that did).  That got me thinking… I wonder where we can get other sightings from…

Traditional media

We’ve been working on Coastal Walkabout for a while now, and I began to notice that the sightings that we see from people logging records are sometimes also in the media, as was the case for Steven Sealberg, the elephant seal that hauled out at Sorrento beach in February, 2014.  He even made the news…

So, this got me thinking about the media as a source of biological observations, so I’ve been doing some trials of harvesting data from traditional media sources for Coastal Walkabout.  As a result, I’ve added sightings from all over Australia from a variety of media reports, as summarised in the map below:

A summarised map of my own sightings in Coastal Walkabout, the majority of which are from media reports

Although I would have loved to have gone to these places myself, the records are pretty much (apart from the ones in the capital cities) all from media reports.  Stories like this one from the ABC actually can deliver some pretty accurate information on the species, time, date and even a photograph.

Unfortunately, a lot of these are what I’d call “bad news stories” – they often depict the harmful interactions between humans and marine animals.  But I’d also call them “bad” for a few other reasons:

• Often they don’t have a date but some reference to a vague point in time (e.g. “Last week, a dolphin was spotted”),
• They very rarely have a time (e.g. “On Wednesday morning, …”), and
• Sometimes they don’t provide much detail for the location (e.g. “…on the southern Eyre peninsula.”).

However, if I can find one story like this then I can usually find a few, and sometimes even a press release from an organisation that can fill in the blanks.

The difficulty is finding the stories in the first place.  I’ve tried using Google Alerts, but so far this is not producing any useful results.  The difficulty I’ve found is in coming up with alert terms that are actually reliable – using thing like “whales” brings back all sorts of news stories about protests and whale-watching which we need to then work through manually to identify any gems of data.

I’ve also noticed in my trawls that some organisations – like Surf Life Saving WA – post sightings and reports via their own Twitter account.  That is a potential source of observational data using this manual process but it could also be harvested with the appropriate settings, like geolocation, species and an identification hashtag, through the social media harvester.  Or we could try to interpret the location based on tweets like this one:

An example SLSWA tweet, posting infromation from Department of Fisheries

So far I’ve found the most reliable means to harvest observational data is to simply do some searches of the ‘net using terms like common names, “stranding” and so on, but I’m also seeing a lot of interesting articles from my friends on Facebook which are pointing me to a range of articles I’d otherwise miss.

There’s probably a few things that media providers could start to implement to help automate this sort of data harvesting, like:

• Using tags on their articles (like the ABC does, e.g. http://www.abc.net.au/news/topic/animals, but with a tag that was unique for observations of wildlife – by the way, this tag got me another sighting!),
• Adding in some more structure around the reporting of place, date and time (perhaps as metadata on articles if not in the article itself), and
• Finding appropriate ways to share articles with the relevant groups that want to harvest them (e.g. Twitter).

The traditional media does look like it’s a potentially good source of data, but the challenge will be in how we can automate this to come up with some great outcomes.  I smell another experiment coming… and a lot of engagement to do.

Got any good articles yourself?  If so, drop me an email, or post them on the Gaia Resources Facebook page, or drop us a line via Twitter.

If you are interested in participating in some of the citizen science projects we’ve been working with, then have a look at Coastal Walkabout, Dolphin Watch, or the Bunbury Dolphin Discovery Centre.  Either Alex or myself would be happy to talk to you about how you can contribute as a volunteer citizen scientist, as a scientist looking for volunteers, as a project leader, or as a group interested in having your own technology solutions for your project.

Piers

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It was a beautiful day in Brisbane

Gaia Resources has been supporting the CSNA setup by providing free hosting for the website www.citizenscience.org.au and also by implementing the email list server.  We have done this because citizen science has been – and continues to be – an important part of our work, and learning how to better help run citizen science projects and keeping up to date with the movements in this area is important.

The purpose of this workshop was to look at how the CSNA should be set up, and I am very hopeful that a clear path will emerge based on what I saw from the audio booth during the day (I was put to work running the presentations and audio).  What also emerged from the day is just how much overlap and replication of work there is in this space.

I think that this is because we are in the early stages of the citizen science “industry” in Australia, and we’re in that shakeup phase, like the introduction area of a product life cycle:

The Product Life Cycle

At the moment, citizen science is still an introductory market, and I think we’ll see the shakeout of the various citizen science products and services over time.  Personally, I think that one important thing that everyone needs to consider in this early stage – developers, service providers, project managers and citizens – is sustainability.  More on that later…

There are a couple of things that I was thinking about in the workshop that I didn’t get to talk about in the panel session I was in, nor comment from the booth, but I managed to post it via a tweet:

So here’s an explanation of that in more than 140 characters:

1. Embrace diversity

Every citizen science project has different aims and groups that use it, so you need to be able to embrace that.  There was some discussion about standardising methodologies across projects, and I think that is a bad idea.  You need to embrace this diversity, let the methods shake out, and instead document the methods really well so that when we share data you can compare apples with apples.

2. Collaborate to succeed

Citizen science projects need to talk to each other, learn from mistakes and share infrastructure.  Importantly, you need to share volunteers and make it easy for them to work with all of our groups.  There is a lot of competition at the moment in the citizen science space, because…

3. Collaboration is hard

This is one area that is really hitting home to me lately.  I would be as bold as to say that collaboration hasn’t happened often in citizen science for a while and I still saw a lot of jostling for position to ‘own’ citizen science and groups wanting to make their projects the World Dominating Citizen Science project.  It seems that there is, however, some good signs with groups starting to talk and collaborate.

So there is a little more explanation of my tweet, and there’s a good example of what I mean in our Coastal Walkabout project.

Coastal Walkabout embraces diversity with the concepts of projects.  We are currently running two production projects, the Coastal Walkabout project itself and the Swan River Trust Dolphin Watch project, with the Bunbury Dolphin Discovery Centre ready to launch in a few weeks.  There are a range of additional international projects wanting to join up as well!

Each project in the Coastal Walkabout projects embraces diversity by:

• Providing the ability to configure the apps and back end to suit the needs of the project – with us recommending that all observational data use some of the basic attributes in the Darwin Core standard to ensure interoperability,
• A separate ‘survey’ in the underlying BDRS system that separates their data, and provides the back end flexibility to manage their own attributes, and
• A simple project page on the Coastal Walkabout web site so that they can see their data in a live map (like the Coastal Walkabout data page and the Dolphin Watch data map)

You can download the Coastal Walkabout (iPhone and Android) and DolphinWatch (iPhone and Android) apps now

The Coastal Walkabout project also collaborates in a few areas;

• All the different projects run on the same infrastructure – so hosting is centralised and costs are shared between projects,
• Everyone signing up for one Coastal Walkabout project can access all of the others with the same login details,
• Allowing anyone to sign up means that the data can be freely downloaded by any interested party, and
• Using Darwin Core style attributes means that the data can be readily mobilised to other systems, groups or even countries.

And of course, collaboration is hard, but by starting with a project that aims to develop into a ‘hub’ where groups can work together, this has made our life a lot easier.

But what does this actually mean in terms of sustainability, the issue I raised at the start of this blog?

The BDRS is an open source package, with the source code available on Google Code.  This has enabled projects like the 2012 Koala Count to be run by groups like the NSW Parks Association, who took the code and reworked it themselves with their own developer.  Dr. Gráinne Cleary and her team have done a great job on using the BDRS to do this – and I managed to meet Gráinne at the CSNA workshop for the first time to see how they did it.

This proves that the BDRS has a future that is sustainable.  There are regular additions to it, we continue to use it in a range of projects and we have recently been looking at the BDRS road maps to look at its future.  The BDRS remains a solid part of our stable of products and we use it for a range of projects both internally and commercially, and we’re actively looking at a few of the issues we – and our clients – have identified in it.  More on that in another blog, I think!

The future for Coastal Walkabout – and for citizen science projects in general – looks bright.  For us, there will be a third project coming on line from the Bunbury Dolphin Discovery Centre in the next few weeks.  For any citizen science project in Australia, I expect the CSNA to be formed, to be independent of any one organisation, and to be a voice for best practice, advice and will enable collaboration between groups.

I’m really looking forward to seeing where the next few years takes us in this space.

Piers

P.S. Stay tuned for a second blog this week about the Tipping Point Conference!

Leave me a comment below, start a conversation on the Gaia Resources Facebook page, or get in touch with me via Twitter.

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One hat I wore was my Gaia Resources hat, where I gave a quick talk at the end of the night about how to use the Dolphin Watch app we produced a while back (as outlined here).  It was only a very brief introduction to the apps – as necessitated by a 5 minute slot at 8:20pm!

The other hat was given to me on the night, and it is a Dolphin Watch hat.  I’ve signed the forms and gone through the awareness training, so I’m now accredited as a volunteer.  Over the next few days, I, along with the other volunteers, will get our welcome emails and information so that we can start to officially undertake surveys around the Swan River.

We often deliver services to citizen science groups through Gaia Resources, but this is a good opportunity for me to be on the other side of the table.  So once I get the introductory material I will be heading out to do some surveys around the Swan River looking for the resident Tursiops aduncus dolphins.

The curved screen at the Planetarium is a bit of a challenge (photo courtesy Alex Chapman)

One of the reasons I decided to volunteer to the project is to be involved in an exemplary citizen science program from both sides.  The way that the team at the Swan River Trust run this project is just fantastic, the small team involved do an amazing job of engaging with volunteers and it’s hard not to want to be part of that culture and project – even if they do drag you on-stage to role-play a baby dolphin, then make you do stair climbing to deliver prizes to the volunteers.

Find out more about the Dolphin Watch program at http://www.riverguardians.com/projects/dolphin-watch/.

Piers

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The Coastal Walkabout version 1.2 Apps are just hitting the Android Play and iTunes stores at the moment.

This new release includes some changes that have been made to the performance of the App, but the main change that people will see with the new version of the App is the social media component.

This new functionality allows for people to publicise that they have added sightings to Coastal Walkabout through either their own Facebook or Twitter accounts.  This doesn’t publish the details of the upload, but provides a link back to the main data screens on the Coastal Walkabout web page.

This is important for the project as this sort of publicity will attract more people to the project.  Of course, you can press the “Done” button and not share it on Facebook or Twitter, it’s totally at the discretion of each person using the App.

On both iOS and Android versions, you must have the official Facebook or Twitter app installed and you must be logged into these apps.  The Coastal Walkabout App will give you directions if your phone is not correctly set up already.

We can also provide some details of the new Twitter Harvester that runs silently in the back of the Coastal Walkabout infrastructure.  This means that Coastal Walkabout now watches Twitter for posts about species sightings!

To contribute a sighting via Twitter, all you need to do is to publish a tweet that includes:

1. A species name, scientific or common name that exists in the coastal walkabout survey. The name has to be a match with the species we have included in the project!
2. A set of coordinates for the location (which you would normally turn on within your mobile twitter App) OR a ‘place’ e.g. Tokyo, Japan, which would only be possible via the Twitter web browser interface.
3. Most importantly, the #coastalwalkabout hashtag.

These tweets are collected every hour and stored within a specific area in the Coastal Walkabout infrastructure, but they also become available to be seen on the main map of all of the sightings at http://coastalwalkabout.archive.gaiaresources.com.au/wordpress/data/.

We are seeing a lot of interest in Coastal Walkabout from people all around the world, and we’re seeing sightings starting to come in all around Australia, and even some sightings from other parts of the world!

Piers

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The Swan River Trust team put out a lot of media about it yesterday, including a news item on Channel Ten news, radio grabs on 6PR and there are articles around on the web this morning – you can read the official media release on the Swan River Trust site here.

The launch was a culmination of a lot of work over the last few months by the team here at Gaia Resources.  We have been working with Swan River Trust and Murdoch staff and researchers to provide this new App, and it has been a great project with amazing engagement from the staff involved, and the volunteers, too.  The dedicated Dolphin Watch volunteers to help us test the App – over 30 volunteers were involved, which resulted in almost 200 surveys and a further 200 ‘sightings’ in the testing period.  It will be very interesting to see how our records change over the coming months as the Dolphin Watch volunteers start submitting their sightings!

Testing results from the two week test period

The new App differs from the Coastal Walkabout one as you can only record sightings of Bottlenose Dolphins in the Dolphin Watch app, whereas in Coastal Walkabout you can record Marine Mammals, Fish, Reptiles, Sea Birds and other species as well.

The dashboard for the App

The other difference is that you can undertake a “Dolphin Watch” in the Dolphin Watch App – meaning a timed survey that is then contributed to the research that is underway by Murdoch University.  This Dolphin Watch function is only available to people that have a Dolphin Watch ID number – which you can only get through training with the Swan River Trust (and their systems check this ID number for each data point… so don’t fake one).  I’ll be going to the training session in March to get formally trained myself.

At the time I pressed “Publish” on this post, the Android version is available in the Google Play store, and the iPhone version is sitting somewhere in the iTunes system waiting for them to run the automated review processes… one of the traps for App development!

Through the Coastal Walkabout web site, you can watch the records flow in across all the Apps by going to the Data page (here).  This summarises all the sightings and tracks from all of the Coastal Walkabout and related surveys, including those from both the Dolphin Watch App and the Coastal Walkabout App.  You can also see the records just for the Dolphin Watch page as they emerge on the specific Dolphin Watch project page (here).

We have a range of other Apps under the marine Coastal Walkabout banner coming up in the near future… and not just marine ones!

Leave a comment below, or start a conversation on Twitter or Facebook with our team!

Piers

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