Online Birding

Discussion

The Co-Creation of a Planetary Nervous System by the Birding Community

David Lang:

"Birding — the amateur pursuit of watching and monitoring bird populations — is a big deal. The numbers back it up. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service puts the number of “wildlife watchers” in the country over 20 million. They estimate the industry is larger than $50 billion. But there is more to the story than legions of spotting scope-equipped, L.L. Bean-wearing retirees moving through national parks and recreation areas. Like everyone else, the birders are now wired up.

In addition to notebooks and life lists, birders are now using apps and centralized databases like eBird and iNaturalist to quantify their work. This data is becoming the backbone for important ornithology work (even though it often doesn’t receive any credit). By turning digital, researchers have been able to turn to statisticians and computer scientists to add quality control filters to the data, as well as tweak the interfaces to encourage more participation from ever growing number and diversity of people. They’ve also been able create beautiful visualizations, like this real-time map of submissions.

The birders are just the tip of the iceberg — a small sliver of a much bigger trend emerging around amateur science.

Networks of makers are creating tools to explore, monitor, and understand our planet in an entirely new way. The pace of innovation is staggering. There have been very public success stories, like the use of drones for conservation or the development of small satellites for continuous Earth imaging. These are more than just clever hacks. Each one adds a new tool to the toolbox of the growing army of citizen scientists around the world. These people — passionate networks of amateur and professional scientists — are busy wiring up the natural world with every sensor they can get their hands on. To paraphrase the ideas of Planet Labs CEO Will Marshall, these are the neurons of a new planetary nervous system." (https://backchannel.com/how-empassioned-amateurs-built-a-new-planetary-nervous-system-8c7636d1215e#.7tiehsd2j)

Category:Science]]