ABI DEVELOPMENT: Notes from Nature: Advancing a Next Generation Citizen Science Platform For Biocollection Transcription

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Biocollections (i.e., natural history collections) represent irreplaceable natural heritage that taken together provide critical information about our national and planetary biodiversity. In an era dominated by planetary-scale anthropogenic change, both historical and recent biocollection specimens and their associated data represent valuable benchmarks for analyzing the biological impacts of environmental change and determining its causal factors. Unfortunately, the vast majority of this baseline data critical to monitor our planet's health are locked away in analog formats that impede their broader use. Desperately needed are new approaches for liberating the data from specimen cabinets. But technological advances that would enable this feat with internet-scale resources, while promising in prototype, are neither scalable to the challenge nor available. PIs from University of Florida, Florida State University, University of Illinois, Yale, and the Adler Planetarium will further develop Internet-scale citizen science - that is, the contribution of data, analyses or solutions to scientific research primarily by public volunteer participants, in order to significantly further the mission to digitize our legacy biodiversity records. Citizen science is not merely a way to enhance data gathering but it also creates mutually beneficial partnerships between scientists and the broader community. In particular, engaged citizen scientists of our nation can gain useful knowledge about organisms, biocollections and their research value, and the impact of biodiversity research on human welfare. The work funded under this grant advances the citizen science platform Notes from Nature from its current prototype into production. Notes from Nature presents Internet-enabled volunteers a set of imaged biological specimens stored in biocollections across the nation, and asks them to help transcribe contents from the labels associated with those specimen images. These transcribed contents are then delivered back to the providers of those imaged specimens. Notes from Nature already has a strong record for engaging the public in high quality data generation, but was developed as a proof of concept that cannot scale to the demand from either biocollections or its devoted citizen scientists. Focal areas for advancing Notes from Nature include: (1) tools for providers that provide near zero-cost and fast involvement (especially Biospex), (2) increased transcription efficiencies, and (3) novel incentives and improved metrics to further user and provider engagement. In the process, the project will build a foundation for increased integration with other national scale projects such as NSF's Advancing Digitization of Biological Collection program and Map of Life. Several natural extensions of this topic are planned to increase public engagement with, and understanding of, science and build diversity in our Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) workforce. In particular, the project will develop functionality for onsite and virtual "transcription blitzes", especially targeted to those communities who are underrepresented in the sciences. Also developed will be a prototype museum transcription kiosk at Florida Museum of Natural History as well as for classroom use with a lesson plan and evaluations targeted at both high school (addressing Common Core Standards) and undergraduate levels. This STEM project will also train two named female postdoctoral researchers. Results from this project can be found at http://www.notesfromnature.org/.