Plankton Portal Uses Crowd-Sourcing to Classify Strange Oceanic Creatures
From the post:
Today, an online citizen-science project launches called “Plankton Portal” was created by researchers at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (RSMAS) in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) and developers at Zooniverse.org Plankton Portal allows you to explore the open ocean from the comfort of your own home. You can dive hundreds of feet deep, and observe the unperturbed ocean and the myriad animals that inhabit Earth’s last frontier.
The goal of the site is to enlist volunteers to classify millions of underwater images to study plankton diversity, distribution and behavior in the open ocean. It was developed under the leadership of Dr. Robert K. Cowen, UM RSMAS Emeritus Professor in Marine Biology and Fisheries (MBF) and now the Director of Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, and by Research Associate Cedric Guigand and MBF graduate students Jessica Luo and Adam Greer.
Millions of plankton images are taken by the In Situ Ichthyoplankton Imaging System (ISIIS), a unique underwater robot engineered at the University of Miami in collaboration with Charles Cousin at Bellamare LLC and funded by NOAA and NSF. ISIIS operates as an ocean scanner that casts the shadow of tiny and transparent oceanic creatures onto a very high resolution digital sensor at very high frequency. So far, ISIIS has been used in several oceans around the world to detect the presence of larval fish, small crustaceans and jellyfish in ways never before possible. This new technology can help answer important questions ranging from how do plankton disperse, interact and survive in the marine environment, to predicting the physical and biological factors could influence the plankton community.
You can go to Zoniverse.org or jump directly to the Plankton Portal.
If plankton don’t excite you all that much, consider one of the other projects at Zoniverse:
| Galaxy Zoo How do galaxies form? NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope archive provides hundreds of thousands of galaxy images. |
Ancient Lives Study the lives of ancient Greeks The data gathered by Ancient Lives helps scholars study the Oxyrhynchus collection. |
| Moon Zoo Explore the surface of the Moon We hope to study the lunar surface in unprecedented detail. |
WhaleFM Hear Whales communicate You can help marine researchers understand what whales are saying |
| Solar Stormwatch Study explosions on the Sun Explore interactive diagrams to learn about the Sun and the spacecraft monitoring it. |
Seafloor Explorer Help explore the ocean floor The HabCam team and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution need your help! |
| PlanetHunters.org Find planets around stars Lightcurve changes from the Kepler spacecraft can indicate transiting planets. |
Bat Detective You’re hot on the trail of bats! Help scientists characterise bat calls recorded by citizen scientists. |
| The Milky Way Project How do stars form? We’re asking you to help us find and draw circles on infrared image data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. |
Snapshot Serengeti Go wild in the Serengeti! We need your help to classify all the different animals caught in millions of camera trap images. |
| Planet Four Explore the Red Planet Planetary scientists need your help to discover what the weather is like on Mars. |
Notes from Nature Take Notes from Nature Transcribe museum records to take notes from nature, contribute to science. |
| SpaceWarps Help us find gravitational lenses Imagine a galaxy, behind another galaxy. Think you won’t see it? Think again. |
Plankton Portal No plankton means no life in the ocean Plankton are a critically important food source for our oceans. |
| oldWeather Model Earth’s climate using historic ship logs Help scientists recover Arctic and worldwide weather observations made by US Navy and Coast Guard ships. |
Cell Slider Analyse real life cancer data. You can help scientists from the world’s largest cancer research institution find cures for cancer. |
| CycloneCenter Classify over 30 years of tropical cyclone data. Scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center need your help. |
Worm Watch Lab Track genetic mysteries We can better understand how our genes work by spotting the worms laying eggs. |
I count eighteen (18) projects and this is just one of the many crowd source project collections.
Question: We overcome semantic impedance to work cooperatively on these projects, what is it that creates semantic impedance in other projects?
Or perhaps better: How do we or others benefit from the presence of semantic impedance?
The second question might lead to a strategy that replaces that benefit with a bigger one from using topic maps.