Total hours to date: 50 hours.
Whilst in Lockdown I have been completing some volunteer online Citizen Science through The Zooniverse website. (33 hours in total)
'What is the Zooniverse?
The Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. This research is made possible by volunteers — more than a million people around the world who come together to assist professional researchers. Our goal is to enable research that would not be possible, or practical, otherwise. Zooniverse research results in new discoveries, datasets useful to the wider research community, and many publications.
At the Zooniverse, anyone can be a researcher'
(Zooniverse, 2021)
They have many different projects where anyone can be involved, ranging from identifying Dolphin calls, to digitalising important information from Nature Reserves, to viewing video clips of birds nests to identify different behaviour patterns.
I chose four different projects to concentrate on:
1. Nestcams - Involved watching short wildlife camera footage of geese in nesting boxes. This was looking at the breeding behaviour of two different birds, the Greylag Goose and the Ibis. The research was carried out to identify which breeding patterns in the nest predict which pairs would have successful hatchlings that survive. (Researchers: Konrad Lorenz Research Centre, 2020).
2. Battling Birds (Panama Edition) - This was another wildlife camera study, this time the camera was set up at a bird feeding station based at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Panama. They were studying the interactions between feeding birds of different species to identify the pecking order or 'dominance hierarchy'. They showed short clips and the different interactions were noted down in a set form which researchers will then study. (Researchers: Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 2020)
3. Mohonk Preserve - The Mohonk Preserve is in the Shawangunk Ridge in upstate New York. This project needed volunteers to digitise 14,000 observation notecards written by the Mohonk Preseve staff from 1907-1989.These notecards recorded information about the flora and fauna from the area which provides an important record of changes of the natural world over the decades. In digital form this information can now be used in studies of Ecology, Biodiversity, land use change and species' range changes. Photographs of the notecards were shown online and the dates, species, area and any other information was then transcribed over to a set form to be sorted by the researchers. (Researchers: Mohonk Preserve, 2021)
4. Frogsong - This project involved listening to short audio recordings taken from sites around Australia where specific frog species live. You were given one type of frog to listen out for and if it could be heard in the recording it was noted on their online form. This study was set up by researchers to be able to develop automated methods of monitoring frog populations. (Researchers: Vertebrate Ecology Lab, 2021). The data collected from the projects on Zooniverse will help them to program the different frog calls into their database.
Email received back from one of the research teams:
We're super excited to let you know we are finished collecting data on Battling Birds: Panama Edition! The last classification was done on Wednesday, February 17. That means we finished the data collection in just under a month, one week ahead of schedule.
Thank you to everyone for being a part of the Battling Birds community and making this project possible. 1,348 people did 135,028 classifications on 18,218 video clips! Plus, so many people were active on the Talk Boards, commenting on clips, sharing their ideas, and posing their questions to the community.
The research team is now working on exporting the data so that we can create the dominance hierarchy and visualize the data together. If you're interested in seeing or analyzing the data yourself, please feel free to email us at birdcams@cornell.edu .
Thanks for all that you do. Congrats again to everyone!
Rachael Mady, Miyoko Chu, Charles Eldermire, Ben Walters, Tina Philips, Jennifer Borland, and David Bonter
Reflection:
These projects have given me a chance to look and learn about many different species many of which I had not come across before. It showed me the interactions between different species and their environments. This also gave a great insight into the changes of environments over time. In all of these projects you could ask advise or discuss the information with other volunteers which was a great way to learn more.
Although I have been unable to complete work in the field due to Covid, the camera and audio surveys on Zooniverse have taught me how these would be carried out and what researchers need to do to gather all the information.
Through this I have developed many skills such as communication, group work, identification, classifying animal behaviours, filling in data and observation forms, and audio listening. These will all be useful skills for future studies or surveys in the field. These are all skills that I was wanting to develop as part of my original skills audit.
References:
Cornell Lab of Ornithology (2020), www.birds.cornell.edu/home. viewed 19/02/2021.
Konrad Lorenz Research Centre (2021), How can you participate in the research of the KLF?, klf.univie.ac.at/citizen-science, viewed 19/02/2021.
Mohonk Reserve - saving the land for life (2021), Natural History Collections, www.mohonkpreserve.org, viewed 19/02/2021.
The Zooniverse (2021), Projects, zooniverse.org, viewed 19/02/2021.
Vertebrate Ecology Lab (2020), Professor Lin Schwarzkopf, www.reptileecologylab.com, viewed 19/02/2021.
Comments
Post a Comment