The 2008 blogger bioblitz is on for the week of Sept. 20 - Sept. 28. (Two weekends to work with!) Blindingly soon, yes, but what the heck.
A portal will be up next week with a data spreadsheet for download; instructions on conducting a blitz; and some basic browsing and querying capabilities.
Keen to put our semantic eco-blogging tools to use, the Spire project has volunteered to do this year’s data integration and analysis. If you want to share your observations, you will be able to contribute data any of 3 ways: by uploading your data spreadsheet; by maintaining an on-line spreadsheet (via, e.g., Google Docs); or by using Spotter to automatically generate an RDF record for each taxon observed. If you do one of the first two options, you’re data will be converted to RDF by rdf123. (Note: Spotter is currently broken on Firefox 3 - we hope to fix this shortly. UPDATE : Fixed.)
Our goal (beyond encouraging people to explore their natural environment) is to integrate data we receive with background and contextual data (e.g. invasive species lists, food webs, etc.), put it on a map, and make it browsable. Our broader goal is to develop technology that transforms bioblitz and eco-blog data into a global human sensor-net.
If you plan on participating, please either leave a comment on this site or send me email, so that we can link to your blog from the portal.
Many thanks to all who get involved!
According to Akismet, we’ve had more than 12,000 spam comments here at FieldMarking. Very rarely something real gets misclassified — far less often than in my email, but nonetheless I have been checking it before deleting. I’m going to stop doing that. I just can’t even stomach the task of skimming it anymore. So if you ever leave a comment that doesn’t show up, drop one of us a line and we’ll be sure to retrieve it or help you get it past the spam filters.
I’m so glad I was able to recruit some guest bloggers yesterday. They are the members of the College Park, MD Kidsteam. These kids (aged 7 to 10) are technology experts and as you can see they are pretty excellent nature observers, too. They are going to help figure out how to make semantic ecoblogging easy and fun for everyone. Please feel free to ask questions or make comments on their posts.
And, if you want to join us you are welcome to blog here too. Just register. Or you can install SPOTter to use wherever you want on the web. This FireFox plug-in will help you generate RDF data for your own observations or that of others. Then the observations will appear on the SPOTter map
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Anticipation is mounting as we all prepare our individual bioblitzes during next week’s National Wildlife Week. There is still time to participate in the First Annual Blogger BioBlitz, just go to the Google group to announce your intention to join in, and to see the protocols and discussion.
Our effort is being promoted by at least some of the right organizations:
National Wildlife Foundation
Ecological Society of America
Today I got permission to do my blitz at the 232-acre Mt. Pleasant Farm, headquarters of the Howard County Conservancy. As part of my research with Spire, I’m planning to introduce ecoblogging to the summer campers. So, this is a great way to get some preliminary data on what’s there to monitor.
My plan is to join their Earth Day festivities on Saturday to pull some invasive weeds in the morning. Then scope out good sites for my blitz in the afternoon. Most likely I’ll blitz on Tuesday, April 24. I plan to focus on three habitat types: riparian, old field, and eastern hardwood. I’ll attempt several kinds of data collection: pit traps for terrestrial arthropods, soap trays for flying insects, birds (with which I’m most familiar), inspection of plants for caterpillars (I’ll keep track of the host plants), netting butterflies, and blacklighting moths. And of course I have a fondness for fungi so I won’t ignore those during the day.
Now I have to prepare my equipment, assemble data protocols and ID resources, and plan the timing of the big day (and night). If I’m lucky my new camera will arrive in time.
Wish it had been mine. During the upcoming National Wildlife Week April 21-29 here in the U.S. ecobloggers are pledging to list all the species we encounter in an area of our choosing. Details are still under discussion but most likely each blogger will choose a day and a place and try to spend at least two hours recording species and their abundances. Jeremy Bruno, the brilliant initiator of this event has offered to compile the results. Geolocating the observations is expected, so that we can display them on a map.
This might be an incentive to get our Firefox plug in ready to be beta-tested during the event. It could make reporting and linking to blog entries easier, though we’d have to push to also get a compilation mechanism worked out.
Background on BioBlitzes
There is a Google group here for discussion.
And a Flickr group for those who will be photoblogging.
Please join us!