Over the years we have developed quite a range of apps in the biodiversity, fire, parks and citizen science sectors.

In the citizen science sector, a number of our apps have helped scientists engage with citizenry to monitor and report sightings of species of interest in order to broaden their research input. Our most long-running partnership is with the River Guardians team in WA’s Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, where the Dolphin Watch app has enabled the monitoring of the small population of Indo-pacific bottle-nosed dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) in Perth’s Swan and Canning River estuary. Over nearly a decade we have put enormous effort into supporting this significant program, where up to 1000 trained local citizens have contributed images, observations and surveys to the project. The project has since been extended to other sites in WA, such as Broome and Mandurah.

Two more recent project to aid species conservation were the I Spy Koala app, developed in 2019 for the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment (DPIE) for the collection of koala observation and survey data to improve the flow of Koala observation data into NSW planning and decisions tools; and Slug Sleuth, , an app that aims to help scientists, locals and visitors to collect observation data for slugs and snails within Mount Kaputar National Park and adjacent Nandewar Ranges within NSW, but especially the threatened Mt Kaputar giant pink slug (Triboniophorus< aff. graeffei).

Significantly, both these apps were developed to submit data to the NPWS BioSys repository. BioSys is an open-source, standards-based data management system built specifically for biological data. The system has a flexible data schema model that allows users to create a schema specific to the structure of their data, and that can apply to just about any biological and ecological data.

The Urban Wildlife app was developed for the NESP Clean Air and Urban Landcapes Hub, based primarily at the University of Melbourne, and contained multiple projects in which to record sightings of bell frogs, beneficial insects, flying foxes, or possums and gliders, usually across all states and territories in Australia.

Another take on the utility of apps – if they can help observe and conserve biodiversity, can they also assist in managing its major threatening processes? Here’s a couple of examples that we’ve brought into production in the last couple of years.

The NAFI Fire Information app brings the most used fire information resource for land managers in northern Australia to a mobile device, providing a constant eye on local bushfire threats.

And, the Essential Service Volunteers app helps volunteers automatically track the duration, location and type of work they undertook, an ID card service to show they’re an approved member of a legitimate volunteer essential service, and access to community discounts for firies and others essential volunteers.

And for the Wildcare Helpline app we worked with the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA) to develop an app that provides a service for the WA public who find sick or injured native wildlife and are seeking advice on where to find care for the animal.

We’ve also developed a number of apps along with DBCA and Trails WA to help the community enjoy the natural beauty of WA as well!. Camping Mate and Marine Parks WA are both DBCA apps aimed at ensuring the user maximises their experience of the Park facilities in WA, both on land ad water. And Trails WA provides detailed information – even when off-grid – to hikers hitting the extensive bike and walking tracks in WA.

And finally, it’s worth noting we also develop apps that have a very restricted purpose. The Mosquito Monitoring App is the first for the Atlas of Environmental Health (AEH). It was made specifically for the use of Environmental Health Officers within WA local governments. More recently, the AEH and the Mosquito Monitoring app have become useful in the Victorian health arena.

You can read more about our work on mobile apps over the last decade, or check out our current mobile apps in the Apple and Android app stores. (Other apps we’ve developed can be found on our client app stores.)

If you’re interested in how our mobile data collection apps could help your organisation, feel free to email me, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Alex

The post Our mobile apps – a recap appeared first on Gaia Resources.

On Wednesday 9 December, Chris Roach and I attended a webinar hosted by the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), celebrating its 10 years of existence and showcasing research into the role of Big Data and data science modelling techniques in managing Australian biodiversity. It was a chance for me to also reflect on my journey in parallel with the ALA in the early days when I was at the Western Australian Museum. I was involved there in aligning the Arachnology database fields with the TDWG Darwin Core standard, so the web team could mobilise our data; then later in environmental consulting; and now here at Gaia Resources where we share much of the ideals of the ALA in enabling open biodiversity data sharing and aligning to internationally recognised standards.

The following provides a summary of some of the important research that was described in this particular seminar series of three speakers.

With platforms such as the ALA, the amount of biodiversity data available has dramatically increased in the last 10 years and empowered biodiversity conservation with so much more confidence in actions undertaken; but many of the ecological challenges that we have faced in the past still remain. These challenges can be summed up in three main areas:

• Sampling bias,
• Incomplete coverage and,
• Data quality.

Professor Melodie McGeoch (La Trobe University) discussed the importance of not just focusing on documenting populations of threatened, vulnerable, and endangered species; but also the need to recognise the importance of occurrence data for “common” species. Whether a species is recognised as common depends on temporal trends, local abundance, and spatial range; and significant declines in any of these areas may go unnoticed when a species is thought to be common enough not to require frequent monitoring. In terms of identifying refuges for preventing diversity and biomass decline, Prof. McGeoch advocated for the modelling of ALA and other data of both rare and common species at a more localised level to understand geographic variation and abundance over time.

PhD candidate Tianxiao (August) Hao (University of Melbourne) used his research in fungal diversity in Australia to show the rapid increase in data availability. Some of this data, however, is unreliable, and so careful consideration must be taken prior to analysis as to whether the data is of a high enough standard to be useful. He acknowledged the new technology and rigorous screening that new data submitted to the ALA undergoes and the large clean up operation that is underway to increase the quality of legacy data.

Both August and Professor Jane Elith (University of Melbourne) demonstrated how the available data is still biased greatly by sampling effort due to environmental or logistical constraints. It makes sense that the easiest to reach places, such as areas near population centres, coastlines and, along roads are the most heavily sampled.

Professor Elith also highlighted the much forgotten bias introduced by a deficiency in absence data. Most ‘observation’ records are for presence data, but having knowledge of what areas have been sampled (and how) without finding occurrences, is possibly of equal significance to documenting the presence of species. Predictive modelling of species distributions are so much more powerful when they can account for bias and ideally this presence-absence type of data capture should be integrated into research and citizen science initiatives.

Professor Elith showcased the eBird initiative as a good example of where using citizen science can provide comprehensive coverage of occurrence data over time.

Gaia Resources is no stranger to considerations of presence-absence data and has developed several Citizen Science solutions over the years. We have also worked with conservation groups like the Great Victoria Desert Biodiversity Trust to plan habitat survey strategies (check out our blog here).

With the help of open-access biodiversity data such as that provided by the ALA, we can all play a part in overcoming the challenges faced in conservation. Here’s to the next 10 years!

If you’d like to know more about this topic or would like to discuss your own Big Data and biodiversity projects, please drop me a line at mieke.strong@gaiaresources.com.au, or connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Mieke

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The ‘price of entry’ for establishing a successful citizen science project seems at first glance to be small. After all, a single scientist with an army of volunteers can get a long way with a well-designed project, and the primary cost is time, some notebooks and computer skills. Engagement is key, as we’ve discussed many times previously.

Many citizen science project leaders come to us looking for the next step – to streamline data flow, improve data accuracy, or extend their volunteer range (in both age and location). A smartphone app is usually what they are looking for. If they have little funding they must usually resort to using existing freely-available apps that meet enough of their data needs; or cajole a mate, colleague or their own offspring to have a crack at developing what they need.

This approach can solve the data capture or front-end process. but the back-end data repository is often neglected, and getting the data out can be difficult and time-consuming. For this part of the market, where good science is required to investigate real-world issues in conservation (traditionally an area that receives little funding anyway), there a couple of new initiatives that might be of great use to Citizen Science.

Google Glide app example

The first is Glide – a new open platform for developing simple yet flexible web apps – without code. From a Google Sheet, Glide assembles an attractive, data-driven app that can be customised and simply shared. Updates to the design or spreadsheet flow on to the user without fuss. Launched in February, this no-code platform makes defining custom fields with controlled vocabularies, automated fields, integrated image uploads and good design available to anyone who can wrangle a spreadsheet.

All submitted data is stored in a Google Sheet, which also makes data management pretty easy too. What Glide apps can’t currently do is associate a geocode with each record, due to privacy concerns. Their work-around is to allow you to enter an address, which is then geo-located and used to represent the observation on a map. The geocode itself is not stored in your sheet, but much work is going into developing the platform and this limitation may soon change.

The second is a new partnership between the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and iNaturalist, the world’s leading global social biodiversity network.

Last month the ALA launched iNaturalist Australia, the Australian node of iNaturalist. It can be used to record individual plant, animal and fungi sightings and thereby access identification specialists who examine your associated images to verify your identification.

iNaturalist – Dolphin project map

While the ALA will be phasing out some of their existing functionality as a result of this iNaturalist partnership (eg. their Record a Sighting function), their BioCollect program continues, with a renewed focus on project-based surveys for environmental and citizen scientists.

To summarise, Glide apps are easy enough to set up and configure to capture any number of fields, data types and media. The data and media are stored in the Google Drive cloud in a readily-accessible CSV format. They are free at the first tier, and fairly inexpensive even at the Pro level for a yearly fee. The apps can be freely distributed and used by project volunteers. Direct geolocation of observations is not currently supported, but addresses can be captured and represented on maps.

iNaturalist and the ALA provide a solid backend infrastructure for setting up projects and linking them into their core datasets for names, taxa, images and user records. The project setup is simple enough, and users can opt in via the free iNaturalist app. Specialists can vet submitted records and images to make the submitted data ‘research grade’. However, the amount of data captured is fixed to a small number of predefined fields such as date, geolocation, species name.

These are both great starting solutions for the many worthy citizen science projects that don’t have reliable funding.  We’ve now helped clients set up both Glide apps (eg. for Black Cockatoos) and iNaturalist apps in Australia, which has meant that they can overcome the barrier of ‘the price of entry’ at the very least – and helps with the ‘longevity of data’ somewhat – although I’ll write more about the ‘longevity of data’ in a subsequent post.

While Glide and iNaturalist might work for a range of smaller groups, for those that have more complex research requirements, as well as grants or institutional backing to capture exactly what their project requires, a bespoke citizen science app is still the most valuable tool to quickly capture high-quality research data.  We’ve built a range of these over the years, and we’ve had significant success – there are a few interesting initiatives in the app space that we’ll be also discussing soon.  In the meantime, we’ll keep looking for more ways that we can support the citizen science community in Australia with ideas and tools like these.

In the meantime, if you’d like to know more about how we can help you with developing a citizen science program, setting up these simple Glide or iNaturalist apps, or how a bespoke smartphone app could even more effectively improve your community engagement and scientific data capture, then please leave a comment below, connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

The post Recent advances for citizen science apps appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The app allows the community to record sightings of certain urban wildlife species, which feeds into research and evidence-based management of these species. First launched in early 2017, it originally included modules for flying foxes, beneficial insects and some species of frogs.

We are very excited to have added a possum and glider module recently, as part of a collaboration between the Threatened Species Recovery (TSR) Hub and the CAUL Hub.

The possum and glider module follows a similar format to other three, with clear screens for recording observations, uploading data and viewing all possum and glider records on a map.

There are 27 species of possum and glider across Australia, so to save users scrolling through all 27 species when making an observation, we configured the app to provide a customised list of species for each user based on their current location (using a geofencing approach).

Possum and glider module in the CAUL Urban Wildlife App

I really enjoyed working with lead researcher Dr Rochelle Steven (University of Queensland) on this new module. Rochelle is very passionate about Australia’s possums and gliders and believes people in the community can do a lot to help support better conservation, especially in urban areas.

“Some people think urban areas are not important for threatened species conservation, but some species are only or mainly found in urban areas, like South Western Australia’s Critically Endangered western ringtail possum,” said Dr Steven.

“Almost a quarter of our possums and gliders are listed as threatened under Australian environmental law, and many more show signs of decline.

“The main threat to Australia’s possums and gliders is habitat loss, but in urban areas, dogs, cats, being hit by cars are also major problems.

“Knowing where species are and how they are using the urban environment is an important first step to conserving them, and we are calling on citizen scientists to help us by submitting sightings through the CAUL Urban Wildlife app”.

In this video, Rochelle describes her research into using citizen science for the management of threatened species, and the addition of the possum and glider module to the Urban Wildlife App.

Video about citizen science research (source: TSR Hub Facebook)

For more information about the research project see the TSR Hub news.

The possum and glider citizen science project is a collaboration between the Threatened Species Recovery Hub and the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub, with funding from the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program and the National Landcare Program through the South West Catchments Council.

The CAUL Urban Wildlife app is freely available on both iOS and Android platforms, and can be downloaded from the Gaia Resources pages on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.

For more information about the modular approach and technical solution we implemented for the Urban Wildlife App, please see our project summary.

If you’re interested in Citizen Science and mobile data collection apps that could help your organisation, feel free to contact me, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Gill

The post Possums and Gliders now in the Urban Wildlife app appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The app is now live for both Android and iOS and we were fortunate enough to have the NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean launch the app over the past weekend in conjunction with the announcement of a new koala hospital in Port Stephens.

I Spy Koala splash screen

We will continue to support and promote open source and the collaboration opportunities it allows for BioSys and our other systems into the future.

You can download the app from here for iOS or Android if you would like to try it out (and have some nearby koalas!).

If you’re interested in how BioSys, or mobile data collection apps, could help your organisation, then feel free to contact me, or start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Andrew

The post I Spy Koala App is Live appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Our newest paper Listening to Save Wildlife: Lessons Learnt from Use of Acoustic Technology by a Species Recovery Team, demonstrates how technology design research can reveal new opportunities, barriers, and future needs for conservation technology. Having been presented at the Designing Interactive Systems Conference in June, we would like to share it with you, as well as bonus pictures, sweet serenades of bristlebirds, and more about my work with the team!

The endangered Eastern Bristlebird (Dasyornis brachypterus)

There is little doubt that plants, animals, and ecosystems are declining at an alarming rate, and conservationists are looking for technology to support their tireless work to reverse these trends. In the early days of using technologies for conservation, the tools used were often created for other purposes (e.g. military or biomedical). Recently, conservationists have taken to developing their own technical solutions, exchanging experiences, opportunities, and barriers, such as through the conservation technology network WildLabs.Net or through social media channels (also see #Tech4Wildlife and newer #Tech4Wild).

A WildLabs.Net website screenshot

With the wonderfully burgeoning development of innovative conservation technologies has come new challenges. There is now an abundance of conservation technologies on the market that people can purchase, such as acoustic sensors and camera traps. These devices allow for massive amounts of data to be collected at a low cost, with minimal disturbance to the animals. This is certainly great, but before running off to purchase these devices we need to have a solid plan for what the data should look like, and what happens to it once we have it. In advance of purchasing devices, questions such as following should be considered:

• Are people going to use any particular data and metadata standards to ensure that the data can be easily shared for broadscale use?
• What biological and technical expertise is required to analyse the data? Do the volumes of data collected require a particular technological infrastructure to manage?
• How is the data going to be used, analysed, and managed?
• How can technologies be used to support conservation beyond locating and quantifying sneaky species? Are the data useful for conservation activities beyond simply finding the target critters?
• If so, what data analysis adaptations are needed? It’s worth thinking of these types of questions well in advance.

Check out the paper to learn about the Eastern Bristlebird Recovery Team’s goals, conservation activities, invaluable knowledge, and interest in acoustics, but even beyond that the team taught me a huge amount about efforts to save bristlebirds. Visiting Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary several times, I learned for myself just how tricky these feathered beauties are to see and photograph, even when captive! Can you spot them?

While visiting the aviaries I learned about nesting behaviours of bristlebirds, and worked with the team to deploy sensors where keepers thought best to capture a variety of bristlebird calls. The keeper herself shared so much invaluable information about the calls with me while we worked together, and even challenged me to identify which individuals birds were making calls! I don’t have her skills! I also had the pleasure of meeting Penny, a former New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage dog who assisted in the surveys to find Eastern bristlebirds in their wild habitats. She is now retired, but it was absolutely amazing watching how hard and efficiently she worked, bounding through tall grass, rapidly picking up the bristlebird scent during a training!

Once we brought the recorders back to the lab, I explored the audio data with team members playing audio of bristlebirds calling, while looking at associated visualisations of sound (i.e. spectrograms), and then discussing calls.

Call type 1

Call type 2

Call type 3

The team takes on a wide variety of tasks to combat the decline of Eastern bristlebirds, regularly evolving new techniques, and eagerly trying new technologies to improve bristlebird conservation outcomes.

From studying this team through a technology design lens, we identified 5 key aspects that warrant detailed consideration by both designers and conservationists to create innovative, impactful conservation technologies into the future.

1. Discern Goals & Motives: Understanding what is driving members of the group both individually and collectively can help share the technological infrastructure so that a variety of interests can be investigated with new
   data.

2. Improve Skills and Knowledge: Interested parties may lack the biological and/or technical skills required to collect and/or analyse data. It’s important to consider how technology can be designed to improve skills.

3. Facilitate Information Exchange: Technology has an important role to play in allowing people to share knowledge and exchange findings in new ways.

4. Extend Beyond the Team: Conservationists are often overburdened, and so it’s worthwhile considering what is needed for broader groups, such as citizen scientists, to participate in use of new technologies in
   conservation.

5. Design for Engagement, Usability, and Conservation Impact: When needing to review large quantities of data, it’s essential to design technology that is fun, usable, and produces accurate analysis to inform conservation efforts.

Technology designers have skills necessary to investigate such complex, wicked problems, and including technology design research in the conservation technology pipeline will reveal novel ways that technology could support conservation more effectively.

You can read Jessie’s complete post on the Queensland University of Technology’s Ecosounds site. You can also give us your feedback by comment below, start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

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We combined skills in spatial interaction to query and visualise the available data with the transformation of resulting data into a well-formed PDF document.  The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) was the obvious choice for data acquisition as they provide an good range of web services to programmatically access and harvest their aggregated data.

Here’s what the team came up with for Fungi in the time available (illustrated below). You can read more about the issues in the previous blog post.

The interface we developed (with one of the field guide PDF files overlaid) – click on the image or here to try it yourself.

Given the success of this demonstration, our developers very quickly modified the code to also provide a Field Guide for Insects and then a Field Guide for Green Plants.

The operation of the mapping interface remains the same:

1. select your family of interest, or leave it set to ‘ALL’ families. The available families in the drop-down have been generated from a query of the ALA;
2. select the drawing tool on the left to draw a polygon around your land area of interest. (note: from the layer selection icon in the top right you can choose to display a street-map or a satellite image base layer);
3. press ‘Scan’ to display the available points within your defined area;
4. click on a point to display some metadata about the record;
5. it is possible to select a different family to display and the results will be automatically displayed;
6. when you have your preferred data set, hit ‘PDF’ to generate a field guide to the area;
7. a well-formed PDF document containing a table of species ordered alphabetically by family, genus and species, as illustrated in the inset above;
8. each table row ideally contains a referenced image (so that you can follow up on the creator and usage information), scientific name and author, family, and the contributing dataset.

This project continues to provide informative case studies for producing useful products from authoritative public datasets. It could be expanded upon and further configured to produce field guides for any other major taxonomic group. Given more time we would have liked to add point clustering and record counts to the map, a dynamically generated drop-down list of only the families occurring in the defined area and improved image attribution. The layout of the PDF could be further refined with the inclusion of a map of the area queried, a species index, and refined content presentation.

We’d again like to acknowledge the ALA for its continuing commitment to aggregating the scientific resources to provide a national view of Australia’s biodiversity, and the many image and data contributors to the ALA.

If you’d like to give us your feedback on these webmaps or have the need for a customised version of these online tools, then please leave a comment below, start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

The post Dynamic Field Guides for Insects and Flora too appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Perhaps you enjoy spending your leisure time in nature? Does playing games online strikes your fancy? Are you thrilled about another activity or cause? Do you love science communication?  Perhaps you are considering exploring citizen science as an avenue to follow your passions, but where do you start? Before you dive into creating a new group or project, it’s worth exploring what groups, resources and projects already exist.  If you haven’t found the prefect project to jump straight into and you are game to create one, then it’s worth considering if there are already online platforms that can assist you with your project – and I have seen quite a few of the platforms around the world from the #CitSci2019 conference!

If your project involves collecting observations of nature and then entering them online, the citsci.org platform offers this functionality for projects in the United States. The citsci.org leaders also ran symposium that explored funding models of different organisations running large scale projects. The room was absolutely packed, which clearly demonstrated to me the struggle we all have with sustainably funding long-term projects!

"Exploring Sustainable Funding Models for #CitizenScience" #CitSci2019 Symposium was packed yesterday! I think this speaks to #citsci funding struggles being ubiquitous. Nice job Greg Newman & Russell Scarpino (@CitSci), Luigi Ceccaroni (@Earthwatch_Eur), & Dixon Butler (@ylaces) pic.twitter.com/0Y0sd28kQF

— Jessie Oliver (@JessieLOliver) March 16, 2019

If you are interested in kicking off a project that entails online tasks, such as transcription of datasheets or classification of media such as images, audio, and video, then it’s worth checking out the project builder on the Zooniverse platform. The Zooniverse currently hosts nearly a hundred online projects focused on several areas of science and some even overlapping with humanities. I was thrilled that #CitSci2019 gave me the opportunity to learn more about this platform in the context of my own technology design research on how to design engaging technologies to search environmental audio recordings to find Eastern bristlebirds.

A sample prototype page from Jessie’s research that she shared during her talks and networking

Of course, Gaia Resources has also been developing their own citizen science toolkit, called Project Hydra, and has used this to deliver many citizen science apps like these.  The nearest Australian equivalent is the BioCollect platform developed by folks with the Atlas of Living Australia, which is a biodiversity data repository.  The Gaia Resources team (especially Piers and Alex) are keeping an eye on all the platforms that are out there and can certainly help advise people on the available tools.

What if existing tools and platforms don’t do what you need?  If you have a vision for a project, but you don’t have access to the technologies needed to make your project a reality then there is nothing to stop you from starting – time to get brainstorming!

There is a lot of talk within the citizen science community about the strategies of citizen science project design strategies, and it’s certainly important to consider what strategy is best for your project idea and your anticipated community. Most projects in Australia are led by scientists and engage citizen scientists to contribute data or analysis skills. Another less common but important strategy is when projects are driven by members of the public who then recruit scientists to contribute expertise to ensure a project is developed in a scientifically rigorous way. Other projects are also cooperatively created, or co-created, with scientists and community members working together from the start.

As you begin to think about technological needs, it is similarly important to consider who is going to be involved in creating technologies, at what stages, how, and why. Typically, technologies for citizen science are often envisioned by scientists who have the aim of solving specific scientific riddles. If scientists are creating technologies in isolation, focused on their scientific objectives, they may not always be well positioned to determine whom might use their technologies, as well as where, how, and when. Are scientists well positioned to study people’s practices, tech use habits, or hobby motivations well beyond the science? Sometimes, sure, particularly if we are talking about social scientists and anthropologists; however, scientists focused on solving ecological woes may not always have time or knowledge to study people’s requirements too. Conversely, community members without any scientific training may not have the background to inform developing technology in ways that will lead to scientifically rigorous outcomes. So, what is a person to do?!

This is where technology designers can help! Folks like myself, trained in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) design, can work with both scientists and community members to explore alignment of interests and goals. Contrary to what most people imagine when I describe my work in technology design, I spend my days studying people, often taking an ethnography research approach with a high level of empathy, to understand people’s practices, motivations for activities, technology use, and more. Most people start considering questions such as:

• Does my project idea require field devices to complete tasks or collect data?
• Does my project need an online data portal?
• Does my project require a mobile application?
• What should such technologies look like?

Before diving into these questions too deeply, however, I typically take a bit step back and consider a different suite of questions first, including:

• Who do I anticipate will be core contributors to a project?
• What evidence do I have to support this?
• Is there a way we could understand this better before creating anything?
• How can existing practices of anticipated participants inform the design of project technologies?

Beyond creating new projects, it’s also important to consider how existing technologies like application and website interfaces might benefit from a facelift. I am particularly keen to also help folks explore re-designing existing technology iteratively (i.e. design, evaluate use, improve design, re-evaluate, repeat). To do this I come from a slightly different angle, working with folks using the technologies to identify barriers to use, ways to extend accessibility, techniques to enhance short and long-term use integration, reaching citizen science groups, and more.

This is the sort of role that we have been discussing for Gaia Resources, to bring my HCI expertise (and of course, Morgan’s accessibility expertise) into the future of the citizen science offerings from the company.  It will be exciting times (when I get back to Australia!).

Now we have a platform designed and technologies chosen, how do I make sure my project’s data is useable for others?

Welcome to the exciting world of data and metadata! Don’t know the difference between the two? Yeah, neither did I until a few years ago.  If you would like more information, this blog from some of our European colleagues does a pretty good job at breaking down data, metadata (data about data), the importance of standardising data, and the ability to exchange data between different databases (i.e. data interoperability).

Groups around the globe are working together to create standards for citizen science data to maximise its usefulness, and to ensure data can be exchanged between the different databases around the world. Being involved in these discussions for several years now, I attended several meetings, talks, and workshops related to advancing these efforts. Stay tuned as this diverse group is currently exploring how to get more information out there to everybody.

Co-chairs Greg Newman (left) and Justin Schell (left) leading a discussion on data and metadata

What if other people are investigating the same general topic, but using different methods?

It’s an ideal scenario for creating an online ‘one-stop-shop’ for people to find and discuss a suite of methods being used. Then newcomers can also explore what methods are out there and most likely to work in their respective regions with a given population of people. If the methods shared need some tweaking to work in a new region or with new people, than iterative adaptations can then be shared back into the group for others to use.

It is this idea that is the basis of the developing consortium called Global Mosquito Alert, which aims to bring mosquito monitoring citizen science methods together.  Over the last few years, I have looked to understand what mosquito monitoring projects engage citizen scientists and how in Australia, and have liaised between those groups and the global consortium. While at #CitSci2019, I was asked to join a panel discussing how the Global Mosquito Alert consortium folks exchange knowledge, and how the consortium are likely to work with the develop Citizen Science Global Partnership and Earth Challenge 2020 initiatives.  It’s wonderful to see so many people working together from around the world to harness technology to increase the impact of citizen science!

If you are interested in more discussion about citizen science and technology, don’t hesitate to let me or other folks at Gaia Resources know (via their social media channels or directly through to Piers or Alex).  We’ve got plans afoot at Gaia Resources around technology and design that Piers and I will be discussing when I am back from this trip so stay tuned for more from us on technology and citizen science!

Jessie

The post Choosing technology for Citizen Science appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The #CitSci2019 conference hosted through the US-based Citizen Science Association in Raleigh North Carolina was nothing short of brilliant. I am beyond grateful to the team at Gaia Resources for their supporting my conference travel to continue my endeavour of exploring technological advances in citizen science globally.

Jessie (second from left) and the other members of the Australian Citizen Science Association delegation

In this first blog, I’ll cover the conference, and explain more about what you can do to get started with a citizen science project in my second blog.

One of the key ingredients to getting involved in citizen science is a passion for a particular area of science, be it one of the natural sciences, chemistry, physics, health computer science, or some topic that falls under the umbrella of science. For citizen science to work, however, there are also a broad suite of other critical roles and considerations that help to plan getting a project get off the ground, ensuring it’s sustainability, and maximising it’s potential benefits to science and society.  A starting point is to look for others who are similarly interested.

If you are interested in connecting with citizen science groups, know that there isn’t a directory for this yet. It’s worth noting, however, that several exist and more are on the way. Currently, for example, there are Citizen Science Associations established in Australia, Europe, the United States (US), and Asia. We all work cooperatively through a number of global working groups, which certainly would not have been nearly as feasible without the Information and Communication Technologies we all take advantage of today!

Each of these groups also uses a suite of communication technologies, from social media, to websites, email lists, and online communities to exchange information with their respective members as well. It’s worth checking these out to get an overview of what is happening in your region. In Australia, for example, several states have created regional chapters of ACSA, which might have activities you can dive into. If your region doesn’t yet have one, it’s never too late to start one! If interested in communications and citizen science advocacy, there is plenty of need for such movers and shakers!

While at #CitSci2019, I was elated to learn of several emerging groups and the citizen science these groups represent! Did you know there is an emerging group for Iberno-America? For those who are like I was and are unfamiliar with the term “Iberno-America”, this refers to all countries where Spanish or Portuguese are predominant languages. While attending the symposium “Towards Forming an Ibero-American Citizen Science Association”, I learned a huge amount about citizen science in these regions and complexities with forming a network we don’t need to consider here in Australia. Those of us involved with other established and emerging associations also happily exchanged our experiences during this symposium. To learn more about this forming group, check out the Ibero-American citizen science website, which Google can translate if you use Chrome as your web browser.

Jessie (standing) providing some insights into what went into the formation of the Australian Citizen Science Association over the past 5 years at the workshop (photo credit: @redricap)

#CitSci2019 also had one of the most thought provoking and important keynotes given by Dr Max Liboiron I have ever heard to date, entitled “The Power (Relations) of Citizen Science”. Dr Liboiron’s keynote unpacked a nuanced perspective on complexities of power dynamics and values such as equity and humility in relation to science. When discussing equity, Dr. Liboiron even gives a strong example of how instrument design can strongly influence who can contribute (and who can’t) using standard protocols and the importance of place-based design, particularly when trying to quantify marine litter.

As I listened to this keynote, I drew many parallels to my own professional work. Whether working as an ecologist or environmental educator in my past lives, or a technology design researcher now, this point articulated how I have strived to work:

“… we do research with people who don’t have science degrees and that science works–and by “works” I mean that people without science are invested in the work they do (because it’s theirs). They’re invested not because it’s my really good idea and I invite them to come in, but because the projects are theirs and I’m there to facilitate it.”  ~ Dr Max Liboiron

Seriously, I recommend checking out the thought provoking summary of this keynote address!

Technology often plays a critical role in citizen science (and more on that in my next blog), whether by making data collection and analysis possible, improving data quality, disseminating information, fostering learning, making activities playful, and more. Often the practices for designing technology, however, is currently given only a little discussion within the citizen science community. With this in mind, I proposed a symposium titled “Designing technology to maximize cultural diversity, update, and outcomes of citizen science” with other technology designers from the US and the United Kingdom, implementing Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and User Experience (UX) design strategies. I aimed to find folks with particular skills in designing for a wide range of people and purposes, including designing technology for citizen science that includes education, accessibility for non-literate people, data management, technical infrastructure, online engagement, and conservation.

Together we ran our collaboratively created symposium, asking each other and the audience questions. After two-minute introduction from panellists, we allowed the symposium to flow very organically with heaps of audience contribution, so while we only got through two of the nine planned questions, we had an incredible discussion as a team of about 40 people! It was clear to us that there is a real interest for the citizen science practitioners, citizen scientists, technology designers, and technology developers to work in close partnership.  With such an enthusiasm for the topic being evident, on the fly, we all collectively decided to keep the discussion going, and we created a #CitSciCHI Google Group. Anyone interested in technology design is welcome to join!

From left to right: Tamara Clegg, College of Education and iSchool, University of Maryland; Jonathan Brier, University of Maryland, College of Information Studies; Jessie Oliver, Queensland University of Technology; Muki Haklay, Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS), University College London; Grant Miller, Zooniverse, University of Oxford; Jenny Preece, iSchool, University of Maryland. Photo credit: Michelle Neil.

If you are keen to read more about the discussion that took place and to read all related tweets from our symposium, be sure and check out notes via Muki Haklay’s blog post, which Michelle Neil wrote up during our symposium. What delightful crew to create a symposium with and even the summary was co-created. Go team!

I hope you found something fun and useful in this blog that highlights just a few considerations for technology and citizen science. If you have any questions at all or would like to suggest other areas of citizen science and technology that deserve more discussion, don’t hesitate to let me or other folks at Gaia Resources know (via their social media channels or directly through to Piers or Alex).  Stay tuned for the second blog that will be all about technology considerations and how to find out about, or start your own, citizen science projects – coming next week.

Jessie

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Marie Taylor welcomed us with a spirited and compassionate message of sharing and caring for country.

The opening address, by the Minister for Regional Development; Agriculture & Food, the Hon. Alannah MacTiernan MLC, was forthright and announced that she was working to ensure $7.5M as a recurring item in the State budget for the State Natural Resources Management Office, who administer the grants rounds where this can be applied for (which just closed on Monday).

Hon. Alannah MacTiernan updating the audience on her work supporting the Landcare community

Some of the other highlights included:

• Dr Nic Dunlop from the Conservation Council WA presented ‘A Citizen Science Model for Measuring NRM Outcomes’, asking the question — ‘how do we measure project success?’  He also discussed the use of birds as a surrogate for vegetation health, and the use of adaptive management methods.
• Jo Ludbrook from Coastcare in the Southwest & Peel regions (CoastSWaP) presented their work and was one of a number of people who discussed their agencies use of the NACC software ‘Photomon‘ which helps photographically monitor landscape change over time.  
• Dr. Guy Boggs from WA’s Biodiversity Science Institute (WABSI) gave a thought-provoking look at their take on ‘Linking Science and Research with On­ground Action’.
• You can watch many of the day’s talks on WALN’s YouTube Channel!

Guy discussing Research – Policy Relations in his talk

During the day I spoke with many friendly and committed people with great ideas, motivations and projects. If there was one message I took from this was that in an environment with increasing need for action yet reduced funding, there is an even greater need for efficiency. This would perhaps best come from comprehensive community access to shared, reliable, current information on the environment and the people and projects working across the land – something we have been working towards with GRID, our easy-to-use online GIS for the natural resource management community, as well as other citizen science projects.

If you’d like to know more about how we can help you with developing project data management, citizen science programs or how a smartphone app could improve your community engagement and scientific data capture, then please leave a comment below, start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

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After a Welcome to Country by ACSA-WA committee member Marnie Giroud, their Chair Agi Gedeon introduced the event, followed by a great range of talks by local citizen science practitioners – some of their abstracts are re-presented below and you can see some images from the day on the ACSA-WA Facebook page.

Dr Agi Gedeon spoke to the event’s title: how citizens are democratizing science.
“Every day we impact on the world around us and it is the choices we make that can create positive change. The first step toward understanding our dynamic world is to become aware of all the parts and their interdependencies. The WA Chapter of ACSA aims to bring together researchers and WA citizen scientists in a community of practice, to build scientific capacity, facilitate connections and empower participants with a sense of purpose and belonging. Citizens can participate in a vast array of projects in many ways! For instance — birds, bees, space, earth, digital to practical, local to global.”

It was great to see many of the projects Gaia Resources has been involved with featured in this workshop, such as UWA’s MicroBlitz given by Prof Andy Whitelely, and Birdlife Australia presented by their WA Citizen Science Projects Coordinator Dr Tegan Douglas, or projects we’d dearly love to be technology partners with such as FungiMap, as entertainly delivered Dr Laurton McGurk.

For my talk, I used our 2018 ACSA National Conference presentation as a springboard, starting with the notion of ‘project lacunae’ and ending with one of Dr Caren Cooper’s examples of citizen science programs that support social justice that had struck me during that conference as a significant innovation in the application of Citizen Science.

Other presenters illustrating the diverse range of applications for Citizen Science were:

Dr Ivy Wong from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).
“Galaxy Zoo and Radio Galaxy Zoo are international online citizen science projects that study how galaxies start and stop forming stars, grow supermassive black holes and evolve. Our curiosity about the night sky and how the Universe came to be is universally shared and citizens CAN contribute towards cutting-edge research in galaxy evolution and connect with a global community of like-minded individuals”, and

Kit Prendergast, a PhD candidate Curtin University researching native bees in urban environments.
“Many people are only aware of one bee – the European honeybee. Yet we have an incredible diversity of native bees. Sadly, their abundance and habitat preferences are poorly known. The Facebook group ‘Bees in the ‘burbs in a biodiversity hotspot‘, opens people’s eyes and hearts to native bees. It engages them in citizen science initiatives to observe and document native bees and to create bee hotels to provide nesting habitat for native bees and monitor their use.”

Each speaker received some great audience questions during or after the event, and exit surveys indicate a real enthusiasm for the presentations and for further events such as this.

If you’d like to know more about how we can help you with developing a citizen science program, or how a smartphone app could improve your community engagement and scientific data capture, then please leave a comment below, start a chat with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

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Filmed in the School of Isolated and Distance Education studios in Leederville (scene of the recent MicroBlitz launch), this seven-minute segment covered the role of citizen science, the Australian Citizen Science Association in WA, and exemplified its value with a quick overview of the MicroBlitz project for which Gaia Resources has been the technology partner over the last four years.

If you’d like to know more about how we can help you with developing a citizen science program, or how a smartphone app could improve your community engagement and scientific data capture, then please leave a comment below – or email me directly via alex.chapman@gaiaresources.com.au.

Alex

PS. You can also watch Piers’ discussing the application of smartphone technologies to citizen science in Marnie’s June 8 2014 show:

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