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Citizen Scientists To Document Biodiversity With High-Resolution Imagery During Summer Solstice
GigaBlitz Captures and Shares
Panoramic Images of Everyday Nature
A
high-resolution image of a palm tree in Brazil, which under close examination
shows bees, wasps and flies feasting on nectars and pollens, was the top jury
selection among the images captured during last December’s Nearby Nature
GigaBlitz. It’s also an example of what organizers hope participants will
produce for the next GigaBlitz, June
20-26.
The
Nearby Nature GigaBlitz events are citizen science projects in which people use
gigapixel imagery technology to document biodiversity in their backyards — if
not literally in their backyards, then in a nearby woodlot or vacant field. These
images are then shared and made available for analysis via the GigaPan website. The
events are organized by a trio of biologists and their partners at Carnegie
Mellon University’s CREATE Lab.
Information
on the GigaBlitz scheduled to coincide with this year’s summer solstice is
available online at http://science.gigapan.org/call-for-entries/.
December’s
GigaBlitz included contributors from the United States, Canada, Spain, Japan,
South Africa, Brazil, Singapore, Indonesia and Australia. Ten of the best
images are featured in the June issue of GigaPan
Magazine, an online publication of CMU’s CREATE Lab.
The
issue was guest-edited by the organizers of the GigaBlitz:
Ken Tamminga, professor of landscape architecture at Penn State University;
Dennis vanEngelsdorp, research scientist at the University of Maryland’s
Department of Entomology; and M. Alex Smith, assistant professor of integrative
biology at the University of Guelph, Ontario.
The
top-rated image from the winter solstice GigaBlitz, Palmiero em flor, by Eduardo
Frick, drew high praise from the guest editors. “We're delighted that this
deceptively simple composition was so honored because it reveals biodiversity
in action and up close,” they explained. “Even deep within our cities,
pollinators such as bees, wasps, butterflies, ants, hummingbirds and some bat
species do the work of moving pollen, ensuring successful fruit and seed
production.” The trio got the
idea for GigaBlitz while attending a Carnegie Mellon conference on the
scientific use of gigapixel imagery. An example of this technology is the GigaPan system developed by
Carnegie Mellon and NASA. It can combine hundreds of digital photos into a
large panorama that can be interactively explored via computer. Thousands of
GigaPan camera systems are in use worldwide and available commercially through GigaPan Systems Inc. Tamminga,
vanEngelsdorp and Smith envisioned something akin to a BioBlitz, an intensive
survey of a park or nature preserve that attempts to identify all living
species within an area at a given time, and citizen science efforts such as the
Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count.
“We
imagined using these widely separated, but nearby, panoramas as a way of
collecting biodiversity data — similar to the Christmas bird count — where
citizen scientists surveyed their world, then distributed and shared that data
with the world through public GigaPans,” they wrote. “The plus of the GigaPan approach
was that the sharing was bi-directional — not merely ‘This is what I saw,’ but
also hearing someone say, ‘This is what I found in your GigaPan.’” Smith, Tamminga
and vanEngelsdorp are fellows of the Fine
Outreach for Science, a project funded by the Fine Foundation of Pittsburgh
to foster scientific use of gigapixel imagery.
Contact:
Byron Spice
412.268.9068
bspice@cs.cmu.edu
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cs.cmu.edu
