Field Photo Library and Gaming the system

[Droege, Sam]

Monica:

The points you made resonate here as well and, I am sure elsewhere in the world.  I think there are a lot of groups moving in the same direction...we need to have information about the places we live and care about, but we can't really afford to hire people to collect the data, thus we use volunteers and the new digital tools that are coming up to collect that information in as statistically appropriate way as possible.

In offline conversations I have come across this group that recently set up the Field Photo Library

http://www.eomf.ou.edu/photos/

They aren't doing photo stations per se....but they are worldwide, work with geo-reference photos, have public/private archives and I think are the type of group that could expand to do photostations.  One could see a cell phone app that would easily do the uploads.

I think that the "game" aspects of this also should be exploited.  Providing photo points in parks and other areas makes could make them destinations on their own.   Several possible examples:

Why are we Visiting this Boring National Park? - Imagine you are taking the little darlings out on a weekend for a hike in a nearby park.  For many kids this seems rather aimless and their strategy is to whine until the parental units give up and come home.  If there were camera stations along the trail then they could be objectives in themselves...."here take the gps and camera and find the next camera point on the trail and wait for me there.....and once we get all 5 then we will head back home."   The photos are uploaded, the web notes that you have added 5 camera stations to your collection of 22 parks and 245 camera points and you feel like you accomplished something.  The Park has also accomplished something in that it can drive traffic to certain areas that get rarely visited and it gains almost real time info about the site ("Boy that trial is really eroding fast").

Tourism Office - They could set up photostation tours of a region...."Tag all the stations on the road to Pennsylvania's statehood."  Or, more subversively, another group might have a photostation tour of the ...."Top polluted sites in the county."

I am Better than You - The simple creation of statistics that counts the number of photostations you have tagged or viewed will be attractive and motivating to groups of people who feel these sorts of things validate them.  People will set up internal goals to visit all the camera points in the state of Michigan...or be ranked number one in the number of National Wildlife Refuges Visited.

I was Here - If you put camera points along trails then at some point the culture of people who walk along trails will demand that they document that they indeed really did walk along those trails and are not bluffing to impress us.

All together gamifying the system should increase the number of photos taken that can be used for later analysis of health and change.

Single pictures at single sites are no where near as powerful as repeated pictures at sites....you don't need a PhD to see changes (but you can hire one to analyze the data and get publications).

sam

Sam Droege  sdr...@usgs.gov                     
w 301-497-5840 h 301-390-7759 fax 301-497-5624
USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center
BARC-EAST, BLDG 308, RM 124 10300 Balt. Ave., Beltsville, MD  20705
Http://www.pwrc.usgs.gov

     Trees
    
     They stand in parks and graveyards and gardens.
     Some of them are taller than department stores,
     yet they do not draw attention to themselves.
    
     You will be fitting a heated towel rail one day
     and see, through the louvre window,
     a shoal of olive-green fish changing direction
     in the air that swims above the little gardens.
    
     Or you will wake at your aunt's cottage,
     your sleep broken by a coal train on the empty hill
     as the oaks roar in the wind off the channel.
    
     Your kindness to animals, your skill at the clarinet,
     these are accidental things.
     We lost this game a long way back.
     Look at you. You're reading poetry.
     Outside the spring air is thick
     with the seeds of their children.     

              -Mark Haddon

On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 3:56 AM, Monica Peters <monica....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Sam/all

I really, really, really like the democratic approach to data collection. I am writing from New Zealand where our Department of Conservation (affectionately known as DOC), has recently undergone further major restructuring. It's the usual unhappy marriage of less resources and more work by a government that feels the environment has taken precedence over economic interests. The aim and necessity for DOC, charged with looking after about a third of the country's landmass, is for greater input on the ground by community groups and businesses. How outcomes of increased on ground works by community groups will be measured is currently unclear but in my opinion there could, and should be a place for photopoints. As for the groups themselves, those that do carry out some form of monitoring often focus on outputs only; for example, predator control (fairly common given our unique, slightly naive native fauna), is rarely measured against gains in native biodiversity. Another good case for photopoints. 

While photopoints are cheap to set up and take, there are big technical questions around how and where to house the data, as well how the data are used, and who by. There have been numerous projects here to create national-level one-size-fits-all databases but the reality is that we are left with different systems in different parts of the country. It would seem logical that a national agency such as DOC house this type of data. While DOC settles into its new structure, rest assured I'll be raising a few questions with DOC staff around monitoring and community groups (given that's the topic of my PhD) and promoting photopoints as a cheap way of collecting very useful data. I'm sure they'll love the 'cheap' part.

Regards,
Monica      

--
PhD Candidate

Faculty of Science and Engineering

University of Waikato     

HAMILTON, NEW ZEALAND 

Blog: www.monicalogues.com

Mob: 021 049 2036

Skype: monica.a.peters

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An open source community for collaborative development of change monitoring systems, tools and applications. People can do this right now using existing materials at single sites or they can organize networks of camera stations at scales of parks, cities, watersheds, counties, states, countries, or the world.
 
This is a presentation of an idea. Anyone can modify this in any way they like and implement it at any scale. No copyrights. No permissions needed. Just Do It.
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Bees are Not Optional

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[Ned Horning]

Sam,

You might want to look at the Picture Post project: http://picturepost.unh.edu/. This photo station project was started this over 10 years ago and it has been growing over the years.

All the best,

Ned

[Martin Fluker]

Hi guys,

I have just recently come across this group - I feel like I am home...  :)

Here is what I have been doing for the last 5 years or so.

Monica - I have about 30 of these Fluker Posts in National Parks here in Victoria, Australia.

Sam - so pleased to meet you.

Martin.