Tending Our Notes from Nature Garden
Sometimes in the shuffle of getting things done, we forget to explain the simplest things. For example, where do all these images come from? Are there more to do when these are done? What the heck is a CalBug or a SERNEC?
So lets answer some of these questions as best we can. As we mentioned in the “About” section of Notes from Nature, CalBug and SERNEC are both regional consortia of natural history collections — CalBug focused on western North American (predominately) insects and SERNEC on southeastern United States plant specimens.
Lets turn to the SERNEC records first. Right now the following herbaria (or single plant collection) are featured on the site: The R. K. Godfrey Herbarium at Florida State University, with 8,368 specimen images available and the Mountain Lake Biological Station Herbarium at the University of Virginia with 6,990 specimen images. Soon we plan to load a third collection of 13,511 images from the herbarium at the University of South Alabama. This represents a small proportion of the millions of specimens found in southeastern United States herbaria, so there is still a LOT of work to do here.
CalBug has about 230,000 images already taken,of which ~33,000 have been already made available via Notes from Nature, with another 28,000 to be added shortly. These mostly come from the Essig Entomology Museum at U.C. Berkeley but also from U.C. Riverside and the California Academy of Sciences. CalBug will also be adding more images in the future. The ones there now represent a select group of insect taxa including: bombardier beetles (genus = ‘Brachinus’ or genus = ‘Metrius’), cuckoo wasps (family = ‘Chrysididae’), odonates or dragon flies, (order = ‘Odonata’), skippers (family = ‘Hesperiidae’), and tiger beetles (genus = ‘Cicindela’ or genus = ‘Omus’ or genus =’Amblycheila’).
Profile of Notes from Nature Citizen Scientist: “jaymoore”
Name: Jonathan Moore (user jaymoore)
Country of residence: UK
What sort of science background or interest do you have? I work in scientific research using Bioinformatics looking at plant, microbe and human gene expression. I’m particularly interested in the herbarium records, as I’ve used the Kew Gardens herbarium in the past and found it a fascinating place.
What do you find most exciting about Notes from Nature? I love reading the careful notes and imagining the collector in the middle of nowhere, in the sun or rain, finding their plant and taking their samples and data.
What’s the most exciting aspect of citizen science work from your point-of-view? I think it’s great that the work of people over the years is being brought into the digital age, so the data can be analysed using modern methods, and I think it’s exciting that people are getting exposed to these different kinds of data sets. It’s exciting to be part of new discovery!
What other citizen science projects (including beyond Zooniverse) have you participated in? I did quite a lot of the exoplanet scoring in Zooniverse, and enjoyed that as a rather addictive game. I was one of the participants among those who spotted 4 exoplanets, and enjoyed that experience. I completed a few of the ship’s weather log records and I’ve also participated in a Kaggle data mining competition so far and came 177th. I’m working on getting a citizen science project off the ground into exploring gene expression.
What to do about too much information?
If you’ve been working on transcribing labels in Notes from Nature, you may have run across some labels that have more information than you’d expect, or possibly what appears to be conflicting information. Sometimes, this is the product of an original collector’s identification being reanalyzed and “determined” by a later collector or curator. Take a look at this Notes from Nature discussion to see how you might deal with such discrepancies: http://talk.notesfromnature.org/#/boards/BNN0000005/discussions/DNN00000j1
Notes from Nature Team Member: Aly Seeberger
Name: Aly Seeberger
Title: Graduate Student in Museum & Field Studies
Where do you work primarily? As a graduate assistant in the Zoology collections for the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.
What you do in your day job? Anything and everything, from skinning and prepping specimens to cataloging and data entry. Once I carried a taxidermied egret across campus and someone asked me if it was alive.
What’s your role with NfN and what do you hope to gain from it? If relevant, how will your research benefit? My role with NfN is primarily “interested party”, but I have helped with some of the text development and beta testing for the program. I hope to integrate NfN and its users into my master’s thesis, with deals with citizen science participants’ motivations. This research will benefit the citizen science community at large by making it easier for institutions to identify and fulfill the needs of participating citizen scientists, and by satisfying these users so that their work with citizen science projects is as rewarding as it can be.
What’s the most exciting aspect of citizen science work from your point-of-view? There is essentially nothing about citizen science that I don’t find exciting, but I think for me the best part of these projects is the potential for exposure to “real science” in a way that few people get, especially those who don’t work in scientific disciplines. There is something about seeing a scan of a museum ledger, a piece of ancient papyrus or a ship’s log, that makes this data real in a way that I think really makes it meaningful. For us, museum records themselves may not be so thrilling, but even those are a glimpse into a behind-the-scenes part of the field that few people have access to, and that is a huge draw as well as a really interesting and rewarding experience.
Profile of Notes from Nature Citizen Scientist: “El_Lion”
Name (or userid if you prefer to remain more private): Eliane Escher (userid: El_Lion and I have no idea how my friend came up with that!)
Country of residence: Switzerland. Born and bred. 🙂 Sorry in advance for my English!
What sort of science background or interest do you have? I’m a lab technician at a molecular biology lab at the university. The span of species I worked with range from woody plants to fruit flies. I was always interested in sciences. Probably, I’m curious (no, I didn’t say nosy!) and interested in the “how” and “why” of stuff going on out there.
What do you find most exciting about Notes from Nature? There’s so much arduous work done by so many people to collect all those species. I know how it is to work in the field. It can be fun sometimes but often enough you get to the point where you ask yourself “what am I doing here??”. Especially, when you’re cold, wet, and feel miserable. And then you need this certain persistence to meticulously investigate and determine the species. I think it’s great that Notes from Nature honors this work by preserving the data and making them available in a digital form, easier to use for nowadays (and future) scientists.
What’s the most exciting aspect of citizen science work from your point-of-view? The “swarm technology” (can I call it that?). I like to compare it to an ant which alone doesn’t get very far but together with thousands of others can build an ant hill. It’s exciting to be part of such a “swarm”. Maybe one day I can proudly say “I contributed to those new results”.
What other citizen science projects (including beyond Zooniverse) have you participated in? I participated only in the ones from Zooniverse. I got to know about Zooniverse through a TV docu in the BBC. However, the Mars project they had portrayed seemed a bit boring to me, so I tried out other ones. So far, I participated in the Serengeti picture project (which turned out to be a bit addictive :-)), in the Seafloor Explorer project and in the Cancer Cell Slides project.
Profile of Notes from Nature Team Member: Mike Denslow
Name: Mike Denslow
Title: Assistant Director for Scientific Research Collections
Where do you work primarily? The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)
What you do in your day job? I am responsible for the archiving of biological samples collected as part of NEON’s field activities. Archiving is the act of safely saving and making available samples for use in research. NEON is an ecological observatory that will have 60 field sites across the Unites States (including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico) where ecological information will be collected for at least the next 30 years. These samples represent a range of organisms from mammals and plants to soils and zooplankton, just to name a few. Now-a-days archiving not only deals with physical specimens and their safe keeping but also the digital information that goes along with them. For this reason, I am also concerned with capturing information about these sample in a digital format and making sure that it accessible on the internet for interested people to find and easily utilize.
What’s your role with NfN and what do you hope to gain from it? If relevant, how will your research benefit? My primary role at Notes From Nature is to bring in photographs of plant collections from various plant museums (called herbaria). I am also responsible for providing feedback on the design of the web interface for the project. I am interested in developing new ways to make more information from museum specimens available for people to discover and use. My hope is that people will also appreciate the importance of museums in the process. There is a wealth of existing information about biodiversity that is not currently available in easily usable formats. It is critical that new ways of getting this information are developed and Notes From Nature is one exciting way that this is being done.
What’s the most exciting aspect of citizen science work from your point-of-view? I really enjoy seeing the things that people notice about museum specimens and the questions that get generated from these observations. The contributors to Notes From Nature find all kinds of interesting things both on the labels and the specimens themselves. I am really enjoying interacting with people on the Talk page and it is helping me see museum specimens in a whole new way.
Video from CalBug
Like the CalBug portion of Notes from Nature? Take a few minutes and view this video that they produced about the need for entomological museum collections and some of the challenges that they face. It’s all part of the strategy for understanding global change. See video here: Global Change and CalBug
Shapely beetles on Notes from Nature
Are you curious about how Notes from Nature is actually making an impact on real scientific research? One of our collaborators, Kip Will, a scientist with the CalBug team at the University of California – Berkeley’s Essig Museum of Entomology, offers some detail in a post on another blog. Kip talks about how he uses the data afterwards, how one of his undergraduate assistants has been involved, and some of their preliminary results. It’s great to know that all this citizen science work makes a difference! – Andrew Sallans
See full post here: Shapely beetles on Notes from Nature
Profile of Notes from Nature Team Member: Kip Will
Kip on expedition in Chile.
Name: Kip Will
Title: Associate Director of the Essig Museum of Entomology and Associate Professor in the Dept. of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.
Where do you work primarily? My research is on the systematics, taxonomy and evolution of a major, world-wide group of beetles (Carabidae). As a field biologist I travel to many parts of the world to sample them. Most of my time is split between the Southern Hemisphere (for example Australia or Chile) and the California region.
What you do in your day job? When classes are in session I teach the wonderful students of UC, Berkeley about insects, evolution, ecology, and behavior. I advise undergraduate and graduate students on projects that range from DNA sequencing to biological-illustration to observations of beetle behavior. I also take time to study the morphology and genetics of beetles in the laboratory and in the museum collection.
Photo of a Californian beetle, Pterostichus morionides. By Kip Will.
What’s your role with NfN and what do you hope to gain from it? If relevant, how will your research benefit? As one of the CalBug science team members, I will help to manage the specimen imaging and the flow of data back from the Citizen Science Volunteers. My research is entirely specimen-based and so having the valuable data from specimens in our collections digitally available for analysis will be a huge benefit to my research. One beetle group I am currently working on has about 125 species that are only found in western North America and most of these only in California. We have tens of thousands of specimens of these beetles to study. Once label data has been transcribed from these beetles I will be able to analyze the spatial relationships among these species at high resolution and look for trends in patterns over long (evolutionary) and short (ecological) timescales.
What’s the most exciting aspect of citizen science work from your point-of-view? Being able to share the thrill of discovery and passion for science with such a broad audience is amazing for me. Also, with the help of volunteers, I now see a task I thought at best would take most of my lifetime could possibly be done in months. This is something of a dream come true.
Profile of Notes from Nature Citizen Scientist: “SandersClan”
Name: Maggie (my userid is SandersClan).
Country of residence: I live in the good ol’ U.S. of A.
What sort of science background or interest do you have? I really don’t have a science background to speak of. I have always been fascinated by repeating patterns in nature, though. My family and I are fortunate to be surrounded by wonderful hiking areas, so we spend as much time outside as we can. We spend lots of time looking for and collecting fossils and interesting things.
What do you find most exciting about Notes from Nature? I am so excited by Notes from Nature mainly because it’s not really repetitive. Each sample is unique, as is the description of where it was found and when. While I type, it’s easy to picture the area I’m transcribing, and it’s never the same as the one before.
What’s the most exciting aspect of citizen science work from your point-of-view? I love citizen science because it’s an easy way to feel involved in something outside of my home and regular life, something ‘bigger’, if you will. I’m a homemaker, which means things feel the same from day to day. With citizen science I can participate in these projects at my leisure. I can invest as much time as I want, when I want, and my children can see that I have eclectic interests.
What other citizen science projects (including beyond Zooniverse) have you participated in? I’ve participated mainly in Sea Floor Explorer, Ancient Lives, SETI Live and Cell Slider, but have dabbled in a few other projects as well. I have to say that I would love to see Zooniverse create kid-friendly projects, especially with summer coming! Thanks for the opportunity to share!
