The blitz be startin’ tomorrow, aarrrr. Here’s a portal where you can view observations, and help with species identification. There are also links into a wiki, where you can read (or help create) instructions, classroom tips, etc.
September 19, 2008
September 9, 2008
2008 Blogger Bioblitz Announced.
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!
June 7, 2008
yellow-crowned night-heron
Last weekend we saw this handsome night-heron while kayaking. Not a bird I often see, as I don’t get out birding much. A friend of mine in University Park reported two in her suburban yard the same weekend — so now it is officially a trend.
Last post I pointed out that tagging was going to be most useful for helping novices with identification. The message for today is that it might not be worth logging every individual observation, but if someone notices an unusual trend maybe THAT should be flagged, and we can use blog sentiment analysis to detect it and let scientists know.
April 25, 2008
Phenology webcams
On the ECOLOG-L list the other day, Andrew Richardson posted a call for people/organizations with webcams to consider joining their monitoring network:
We are conducting a “near” remote sensing project to monitor vegetation
phenology using webcam images. We have established a network of about a
dozen sites in the northeastern US and adjacent Canada, and we are
archiving daily images from these cameras (for a map of sites, and some
sample images, see http://www.forest.sr.unh.edu/richardson/#Towercam).By separating camera images into red, green and blue color channels, we
are able to extract seasonal signals of spring green-up as well as autumn
coloration and senescence (see my 2007 paper in Oecologia for details).
How cool to be able to automate this data gathering process.
In an email exchange he also encourages individual contributions:
If phenology is of interest to you, I’d urge you to consider contributing
to the Northeast Regional Phenology Network (NE-RPN) which is part of the National Phenology Network.
Jargon aside, phenology has to do with the timing of life events, such as flowering, setting seed, nesting, etc.
I’m going to take a look, though my own gathering of data is likely too slipshod for their needs. When I get a chance I’ll try to evaluate what they have and post results here. In the meantime, check it out yourself.
September 16, 2007
Announcing Spotter 1.0
On Friday we announced the release of our semantic blogging tool, Spotter. There are more details on our parent blog, eBiquity. This is the tool we’ve been using to add the little owl that links to RDF-formatted observation data on this blog. As long as you are using Firefox, you should be able to use it on any blog or any other web page where you can add links.
Please consider using Spotter and letting us know what you think. This is ongoing research and we need feedback to help improve our work.
May 24, 2007
Wrapping up the Rock Creek BioBlitz
I am not an expert in any group other than birds and there are plenty of birders better than I am. For example, read John’s account of his experiences birding for the BioBlitz. So, I spent my Saturday morning shift shadowing the scene at the scientists’ area near the Nature Center.
My colleagues at the Lepidoptera tables, Don Davis, John Brown, and Mark Metz, were busy sorting and pinning the winnings of the blacklights and traps set out overnight. I had helped Eric Lind set up one of these the previous night. They did reasonably well, though Don Davis remarked that warmer weather would have meant more than a hundred species rather than the 40 or so they found. The final tally across all groups, now reported on the official BioBlitz blog as 666, will continue to climb as entomologists in particular tackle the laborious task of identifying specimens. More than once I saw one expert say to another, “I dunno what it is” and shrug their shoulders. For me this illustrates that 1) taxonomic experts, with total focus on and vast knowledge of their groups, are human too, 2) nature’s diversity even in an urban park is awesome, and 3) specimens are invaluable for such inventories. I assume that the 666 includes their estimates of how many different kinds, even if the bug folks really don’t know exactly what they found yet. No comment on the significance of the number of the beast vis a vis the evolutionary bent of this whole enterprise.
May 18, 2007
Myxomycetes at the Rock Creek BioBlitz
Lead off story: These stylish brown tufts are the fruiting bodies of Stemonitis (probably S. axifera), a beautiful slime mold lurking under a rotting log. Never would have known what they were, except I ran into Dr. Harold Keller and a team of canopy climbers as we returned to base camp from our field outing. They came all the way from the University of Central Missouri to look for slime molds, lichens, and other canopy dwellers. He looked at the photo, said it was a beautiful specimen and wished I’d collected it. Next time I’ll know how to collect slime molds (you cut off the bark they are on and glue the whole thing to the bottom of a box).
As the Urban Pantheist notes, it is really hard to focus on too many things at once. At least 50% of my three hours with the herp survey team were spent trying to keep my kids entertained so they wouldn’t annoy everyone around them. Still, I feel I’ve made up for not herping on my Blogger BioBlitz. Plan to spend tomorrow morning with the Lepidopterists, who don’t expect much in this chilly weather.
What we saw:
May 16, 2007
Rock Creek Park Bioblitz — join us!
Blogger BioBlitz results are due soon, and the Spire team is still planning to get that data out on the Semantic Web where we can play with it. In the meantime, I’ve got a chance to redeem myself at another bioblitz — this time a traditional one with massive scientist and volunteer participation. The site is Rock Creek Park in the heart of Washington, DC. It is probably not to late to join in the festivities, which begin at 11:30 a.m. this Friday and go until noon on Saturday. Get more information and sign up at the National Geographic site.
I say I can redeem myself because I never did do the blacklighting for moths that I promised for the Blogger BioBlitz. So I’m planning to learn from two of my Leptree.net colleagues, Don Davis and John Brown, as they inventory the Lepidoptera in the park.
A second choice might have been to join the amphibian survey team. One morning I tagged along with Evan Grant, a USGS biologist and University of Maryland graduate student, searching for stream salamanders in Rock Creek Park. The deepest reaches of the park can be surprisingly quiet. I highly recommend creek-walking, whether for science or for pleasure (not that the two are mutually exclusive).
May 10, 2007
Encyclopedia of Life media push
Yesterday I got scads of emails spreading the news that the big Encyclopedia of Life effort is launching, and of course the media are properly excited. The YouTube video doesn’t hurt. EOL aims to deliver rich pages on every species ever described (1.8 million and counting), and to do it with flash and panache.
EOL builds on the work of so many who have gone before — the list of potential sources for their mash-ups is impressive. But for the most part these efforts have never had the kind of financial resources and talent available to this project.
It is incredibly ambitious. Pulling together information on species we know well will be hard enough — negotiating vast scattered resources whose structure varies. Often the information conflicts and somebody has to figure out how to handle those conflicts. That’s part of why we haven’t yet got a global resource like this. To pull together information on species we barely know will be even harder, as much of it is in rare books or in hidden museum drawers. These pages will be the most valuable, as they will be new to the digital universe.
They say it will take ten years to complete, but if they do it right it should never be finished — it will change as our knowledge grows, as controversies arise and are resolved and as the world itself changes.
Partnerships among academia and industry and the general public will make the difference. Unlike Wikispecies, which is a similar Wikimedia effort, the scientific community appears to be behind this because it is the product of a consortium of respected scientific instititutions. Industry brings the “entertainment” and interactive sides to this that will help draw the public in.
As a scientist, I’ll want to know whether you can really get DATA out of it — could I find what I need, download and conduct comparative analyses on it? Or would it be easier and safer to go to the original sources? Will it be clear where the scientific jury is still out?
As someone who has spent eight years working on web-based biodiversity projects, I want to know will it be straightforward for me to add my online databases to the mash-ups? Will financial resources be available to source projects to develop, maintain and integrate their information with the larger effort? EOL’s model of sustainability won’t work if everyone else’s funding dries up. Will they use community standards for data exchange or propose their own? Use traditional technologies or foster new ones?
For the public, the question is whether it will be easier to use Google or Flickr or Wikipedia, or any of the previous, local or topical efforts at species pages. And whether we’ll be prompted to engage with nature in ways other than browsing an attractive website.
The potential benefits, however, are enormous. Baba Dioum, the Senegalese poet, said, “In the end, we conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.” Is EOL a quantum leap towards understanding the world’s biological diversity, or is it just hype?
I, for one, intend to help where I am able.
May 4, 2007
Guest bloggers
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
.