Hi Everyone,

The Notes From Nature project needs your help to digitize the treasure trove of biodiversity data stored in our natural history collections. NFN has some exciting news and a big favor to ask of you, particularly given this is Citizen Science Week, celebrating all the amazing efforts by volunteers here at Zooniverse and around the globe. As part of the events for the week, the project will be featured during the White House Science Fair! 

As we noted recently (https://blog.notesfromnature.org/2016/01/07/happy-new-year-to-the-notes-from-nature-community/), we will be re-launching with an all-new site and are soon ready to go live! As part of this process, we have set a goal to complete all of the images that remain on the site. This is close to 25,000 transcriptions. We are aiming to complete the remaining transcriptions by end of May, and we need your help to make that goal.

The images that you will find come from different types of museum specimens. Our focus is to finish our current macrofungi (mushrooms!) and herbarium specimens (plants!). Unlocking these data is critical to our understanding of biodiversity and we need your help to do it.

Please head over to Notes From Nature right now to help us complete our challenge at www.notesfromnature.org

Cheers,

Michael and the Notes From Nature Team

A few days ago the CalBug Expedition on wood boring beetles was completed. We want to extend a special thanks to all the volunteers that made this happen!  

 We are also excited to announce that this completion also marks the transition to the next phase of NFN. You will notice that there are no longer any pinned specimen images to transcribe on the site. In fact, we won’t be posting any additional pinned insect images until the new NFN site is launched some time during late Spring or early Summer.  We are already in the process of preparing a new set of CalBug expeditions just as cool as the wood-boring beetle effort we just finished.

You might be wondering about this new and shiny NFN 2.0? Our new NFN site is going to have some great enhancements for everyone involved in the process of doing citizen science transcriptions of natural history collections, and we’ll be talking more, right here, about all the neat stuff with NFN 2.0 soon. Stay tuned!

During the next two months we will focus on finishing up (retiring) existing images of bird ledges, macrofungi labels and herbarium specimens. As these current collections finish those interfaces will be temporary closed until the new NFN is launched. When the new version goes live we plan to provide more focused content across all the interfaces. This means that we will have a lot more expeditions for you to take that are geographically and/or taxonomically focused.  Again, more soon as we get all the pieces in place.

In the meantime there are still many ways to help! We still have lots of images available of bird ledges, macrofungi labels and herbarium specimens.  In fact, we need your help especially right now, as we hope to finish up those collection in the next month or so, to time with our relaunch.

In appreciation,

The NFN Team

Last week another herbarium collection reached 100%! As always we want to thank all the volunteers that helped make this possible. The NFN team is thrilled to see this progress as we move towards launching a new version of NFN this coming spring. Our goal is complete all the current collections before this time.

The collection that was just completed is from the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, however the specimens in these images were originally from the Vanderbilt University herbarium. This collection was housed on the Vanderbilt University campus until it transferred to Texas in 1997. These kinds of transfers between museums happen from time to time, but this one is notable for it’s size (over 350,000 specimens) and historical importance. The Vanderbilt collection is mostly comprised of specimens collected by R. Kral who was a very important collector in the southeastern United States. We will have more specimens from this collection coming in the future.

For those looking for more herbarium specimens, we still have two active collections where you can contribute today.

Earlier this week the NFN team realized that we had retired an earlier CalBug collection a bit too early. There were 530 images that still needed to be transcribed. For this reason, this collection was put back up live on the NFN site earlier this week. Late yesterday our volunteers completed this collection. We are really excited to see two collections complete in one week!

The NFN team once again wants to sincerely thank our amazing volunteers (new and veteran!) for their effort!!

Still hungry for more CalBug images to transcribe?! CalBug Expeditions is still active and is 63% complete at the time of this posting.

Last week our volunteers completed the University of South Florida herbarium collection. We are excited to see this collection complete and wanted to take this opportunity to thank our awesome volunteers for their effort!

This was a relatively small collection of images (~500). The University of South Florida is similar to many collections in the SERNEC network as it is a small to medium sized collection housed at an academic institution. This collection is somewhat unique in that it has a large collection of cultivated plants.

This collection has been moved to our relatively new completed collections page. Thanks again to all the volunteers that helped with this collection!

As many of you know, Notes From Nature collects more than one transcription for each image (or subject, in Zooniverse speak). This is not uncommon among Zoonivere projects. This means that we get more than one set of data for each specimen image, making sure that each transcription is done by a different user. In fact, the algorithm does not permit a user to transcribe the same image more than once. This is why it is possible for a collection to be incomplete, but some users are no longer served images to transcribe.

The purpose behind this is to assist with quality assessment of the data. It is not that our volunteers do not provide quality transcriptions! In fact, in many cases Notes From Nature volunteers provide higher quality transcriptions than trained technicians. However, there are various situations where the information on a label can be up to interpretation. This is especially true for handwritten labels and information that goes into our free text fields (e.g. locality). Having more than one transcription helps us come up with the best possible transcription for a given image, using software that analyzes the whole set of transcription.

This is not the first time we have changed the number of transcriptions. When we first started Notes From Nature in 2013 we were collecting 10 transcriptions per image, which we quickly realized was many more than was needed. We reduced the number of transcriptions to 4 per image. We recently reanalyzed this issue again and found that 3 transcriptions per image would be sufficient. This means that we have moved from 4 to 3 transcriptions per image as of this week. So far this has taken place in the CalBug, Herbarium and Macrofungi interfaces.

Some of our volunteers have already noted that our progress bars showed a bit bump this week and this is the reason why. When the algorithm was changed any images with 3 transcriptions were immediately retired from the queue. As always, we greatly appreciate your hard work and are continually looking for ways to make this project more efficient and enjoyable!

The NFN team wants to wish you all a Happy New Year! We also want to give a brief update about some of the things happening in 2016.

We have a lot of activity going on this year thanks to funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation. We will be posting more information, as new advancements are made and certainly prior to any major site changes. The main activity right now is a transition of NFN to a new platform called Panoptes. The current platform is called Ouroboros and we will be transitioning to the new platform by early summer. A few other Zooniverse project are also making this transition. For example, a new version of Old Weather has already been launched on this platform.

The upside of Panoptes is that it is open source and will allow for addition features to be added and bugs to be fixed much more easily. This will give the research team a lot more flexibility and value over the long haul as NFN continues to evolve. In addition, the new platform includes an improved Talk page. The new Talk is already being used on the main Zooniverse site if you want to see how it works.

The platform upgrade is just the beginning of several changes that will be taking place over the next few years of this grant funded project. There will be additional features that will be of direct benefit to our volunteers, such as improved volunteer profiles. We will also be bringing in biodiversity information from external sources such as Encyclopedia of Life and Map of Life. The goal is to give even more meaning to the specimens and the organisms that are preserved in the specimen images.

As part of the transition to the new NFN we will be pushing to complete the existing sets of images before any new interfaces are launched. Since the herbarium (SERNEC) interface will be the first project to launch on the new platform, we will be focusing on completion of those image sets in the coming months. There will be more information about our strategy for doing that very soon.

Hi All,

Notes From Nature was down for most of the last two days. The problem was fixed late last night and all the interfaces should be working now.

Thanks to our dedicated volunteers for pointing this out and for providing details of the issues you were encountering. I want to give a shout out in particular to the users am.zooni, maggiej, Bonnie123 and HelenBennett57!

Please post in the Talk post here if you see any other issues over the next few days.

Happy Winter Solstice and Happy New Year!

The Crab Shack at Notes From Nature has temporarily shut its doors, for the best possible reason: we’re done! In barely over a month, an amazing group of transcribers has completed data transcription from nearly 1,000 samples (upwards of 4,000 transcriptions, since each sample is transcribed four times). That’s the complete collection of crabs in the family Cancridae that we have here at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

This was a particularly challenging transcription project. There were over a dozen data fields, and a truly ambiguous mapping of text on labels to database fields. This was really a stretch for the Notes From Nature team, and we’re extremely grateful! Deep thanks to Rob Guralnick, Rafe LaFrance, Libby Ellwood and Michael Denslow for putting it all together in time for the WeDigBio blitz.

Are we happy about how it went? Extremely! Here’s a snapshot of a few of the Happy Crab Shack Biologists here at the Museum right after we learned of the completion. From left to right, that’s Dean Pentcheff, Regina Wetzer, and Jenessa Wall. Not shown are Kathy Omura, Adam Wall, and a crew of interns, volunteers, and work-study students from the University of Southern California (who did the specimen and label photography).

But of course, the core contribution came from the many transcribers out in Internet-land. To all of you — thank you so much! This project happened and succeeded because of your persistence on this (admittedly ambiguous) project.

Even without looking at the data in detail, some gems have emerged. One example is a sample that, from its label data, we now know was collected in 1901 at an early marine laboratory near us in San Pedro. The photo shows the crabs and the labels that were transcribed. The boat “Elsie” was used by researchers at the lab before the operation moved to the San Diego area, where it became the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. At the time, San Pedro was a pretty rough place, but was home to (among other characters) an eccentric group of women pursuing marine biology. We had no idea that we had any specimens from that era.

While the Crab Shack is currently not serving any entrées, we’re not closing shop for good. First, we need to analyze and ingest the amazing dataset we now have. Based on what we learn from the data and the feedback from this expedition, we’ll be moving forward (again, teamed with the great Notes From Nature crew) to open a newly refurbished Shack, journeying on to a new group of animals (still to be determined).

We look forward to having you on board again!