Biodiversity and Ecosystem Informatics - BDEI - Planning a Community Science Approach to Biodiversity Monitoring: Extending the Spatial and Temporal Scales

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EIA-0131927Stevenson, RobertUniversity of Massachusetts - BostonBDEI: Planning a Community Science Approach to Biodiversity Monitoring: Extending the Spatial and Temporal Scales.Increasing the spatial scales and temporal frequencies at which species occurrences and locations arerecorded is central to biodiversity informatics. There are not nearly enough trained scientists to do thejob and remote sensing methods have severe limitations for most taxa. This project examines the ideathat it is now possible to rapidly build communities of people (academic taxonomists, amateur naturalhistorians, environmental educators, concerned citizens and students) and institutions (universities,environmental NGOs, governmental agencies and schools) to produce important scientific data aboutbiodiversity. Building monitoring communities is made possible by digital technologies that permit threekey advances:1) Rapid Color Guides, the production on demand of high quality yet relatively inexpensive mini colorfield guides (here called Rapid Color Guides, Foster 1998) that will allow amateurs to correctly identifymany more species in the field.2) Spatial Coordinates, the ability to accurately record (within a 3 m radius under the best conditions) thespatial coordinates of individuals or populations using new GPS (Global Positioning System) units.3) E-Vouchers, the availability of very high quality digital cameras that are field portable and relativelyeasy to use that can capture an electronic record of observations in the field.Along with the wide acceptance of the WWW, these advances permit people to gather and sharebiodiversity information in unprecedented ways. Three studies are planned and prototyped to examinethis general claim. First, the variety of taxa recorded during Massachusetts Biodiversity Days, a three-day statewide citizen-based effort to monitor biodiversity already established in Massachusetts(http://data.massgis.state.ma.us/Biodiversity/BiodiversityDays.htm) will be expanded. Taxonomicspecialists using digital cameras and printers will design Rapid Color Guides for taxa, which are common(e.g. ants, bumblebees, spiders, weeds) but rarely recorded by observers because of the lack of a suitablemethod to identify them.