[GPSCC-chat] [Fwd: A Hackerspace for Biotech]

[Wes Rolley]

Interesting, Tian, that you posted this the same day that I read KQED's 
Climate Watch blog post on Citizen Science.

http://blogs.kqed.org/climatewatch/2011/02/14/why-the-pros-need-citizen-science/

*Naturalist Update: A biologist's take on the potential for citizen 
science in a changing climate*

(Photo: Richard Morgenstein)

Last month I went out to Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve near Stanford, 
where Scott Loarie and Ken-ichi Ueda showed me and about a dozen docents 
how to use the new iNaturalist iPhone app 
<http://blogs.kqed.org/climatewatch/2011/01/29/citizen-science-the-iphone-app/>, 
which Ueda created. The aim of the app is to make recording and sharing 
of accurate field observations incredibly simple. It's still in testing 
mode and not yet available to the public. "Citizen scientists" can 
already upload their digital photos and share them with an online 
community of naturalists around the world, at the iNaturalist website.

This week I spoke with Healy Hamilton, who directs the Center for 
Applied Biodiversity Informatics <http://research.calacademy.org/cabi> 
at the California Academy of Sciences. Below are some excerpts from our 
interview about climate change, citizen science, and iNaturalist:

*Q: What's the potential of citizen science?*/
A: The world is changing faster than ever before in the history of all 
human  civilization. There's no way that scientists can monitor those 
changes. It's critical for us to understand the pace of change, and 
where change is taking place the most.
/

/With global change, there's a fundamental rearrangement of where 
species live.  We already know almost everywhere we look that species 
are on the move trying to track their preferred climate envelopes. To 
understand the implications of this kind of shifting, we need to have 
people help us monitor these changes, both the rate of the change and 
the locations of the changes. This is where there's a profound role for 
citizen science./

*/Q: /How can a tool like iNaturalist help scientists study climate change?*
/A:...Citizen science can help us understand how climate change is 
unfolding in situ. Every species has edges to their range, so there's 
sort of a central range, a northern leading edge, a southern edge, 
eastern and western edges.  Citizens can help us monitor how climate 
change is impacting the edges of those ranges, which is where climate 
impacts are most likely to occur. /

/For example, some of the easternmost redwood forests are likely to 
experience the highest summer temperatures [in the redwoods' range], and 
summer temps seem to be changing quite rapidly, maybe more than temps at 
other times of the year.  So if citizens can help us say, 'Look, I just 
saw a grove of redwood trees and the leaves are brown and this is where 
it's located,' we can actually map climate in that area and see how 
climate change is unfolding on the landscape.  There's no way scientists 
can be everywhere at once to understand how these changes are unfolding, 
but citizens are hiking through redwood forests all the time./

/...So applications such as iNaturalist are going to increase the 
biodiversity data that scientists have to work with. Not all 
observations are going to be useful, but many of them will be useful to 
us. Because of our need for verified observations about what occurs 
where and when on the planet, as scientists, we think citizen science 
has a huge role to play in improving our models about forecasting future 
climate change impacts to species and ecosystems./

*/Q: /Why do we need to study these changes?  What's the big picture?*
/A: Climate change is the single most important threat that's facing all 
of human society.  If we continue to emit the current rates of 
greenhouse gases into the future, and if we do end up with 900 or 1,000 
parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere at the end of the century, we 
will be living on a fundamentally different planet, and that transition 
is not going to be comfortable for us.  All of our society, all of our 
infrastructure, all of our food resources, our forest resources, the 
things that we need, the things we've evolved our society around 
consuming, they like the climate the way it was, [at] about 150-300 
parts per million of CO2.  So it's important to understand how climate 
change is going to influence biodiversity, the biodiversity we depend 
on, every bite of food we eat, the clothes on our back, all of our paper 
and forest products. It influences how diseases are transmitted and all 
kinds of public health, food security, and national security issues./

In this short video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28MWPNmdiVY>, Scott 
Loarie and Ken-ichi Ueda explain how the iNaturalist iPhone app works.



On 2/14/2011 4:26 PM, Tian Harter wrote:
>
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject:     A Hackerspace for Biotech
> Date:     Mon, 14 Feb 2011 19:16:13 EST
> From:     TNHarter at aol.com
> To:     tnharter at aceweb.com
>
>
>
> >
> >  Eri Gentry
> >
> > A Hackerspace for Biotech
> >
\
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