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Table of Contents:
Keywords:Biodiversity loss, conservation history, Internet, field guides, identification, citizen monitoring, citizen science |
"In order to want to preserve something, one has to appreciate it first, and the number of people who are intimately familiar with natural landscapes outside of the city and with wild species other than rats and pigeons grows proportionately smaller every day".
-- David Ehrenfeld, Conservation Biology 1970, p. viii |
The science of Conservation Biology has documented the loss of biodiversity and uncovered both the immediate and root causes that are imperilling our natural heritage. Despite this new understanding, society’s views have not fundamentally changed and we have not yet adopted system-wide practices that will preserve biodiversity. Our innate psychological connection to the natural world, as posited in E.O. Wilson’s Biophilia hypothesis, offers a leverage point to fostering conservation-centric worldviews. The goal of the Electronic Field Guide (EFG) Project is to provide a tool that allows citizens to develop more nature-centric views. The EFG tool is designed to let field guide writers easily generate field guides that can be shared over the Internet and used on PDAs. The availablility of such guides would lower the barriers for people to learn the names and biology of many organisms in and around the places they live. Field guides mostly rely on images for identification. In this article, I discuss the use of images to identify organisms and illustrate how most of us, including most biologists, are amateurs in our knowledge of biodiversity. Finally, I review the notion of citizen science as developed by the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell and discuss how its model and informatics approach are being extended beyond an avian focus.
For more than thirty years, scientists trained in ecology have undertaken new applied studies in conservation biology because of the multitudinous threats to non-human organisms that they have perceived and documented. Conservation biology currently plays a major role in the environmental movement because the public understands “nature” is threatened and that species extinction is forever.
In the academic realm, much has been accomplished to advance the understanding of biodiversity (Brown and Lomolino 1998, Hubbell 2001, Groombridge and Jenkins 2002) and the science of conservation (Soule and Kolm 1989, Soule et al. 2001, Terborgh et al 2002, Rosenzweig 2003). Scientists have identified and catalogued the causes of biodiversity loss into two major categories: proximate and root causes. The proximate causes of biodiversity loss are: habitat destruction and fragmentation, invasive species, pollution, global climate change, overexploitation, and infectious diseases (Lubchenco 1998, Daszak et al 2000, Wilson 2002, p. 50). Root causes include social inequities, economic systems, and population growth (World Resources Institute 1992, Wood et al 2000, WWF 2003).
In the political realm, there has also been significant progress in addressing loss of diversity. Biodiversity made it onto the global agenda of the United Nations in the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (http://www.un.org/geninfo/bp/enviro.html) which produced the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (see http://www.biodiv.org/). As a result of the Rio conference, many countries and more local governments have enacted legislation that is designed to protect species and ecosystems.
In addition, local, national and international non-profit organizations are playing a key role in preserving biodiversity. For example, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, http://www.gbif.org/) is organizing biodiversity information on a global scale, as are Conservation International (http://www.conservation.org/xp/CIWEB/home), The Nature Conservancy (http://nature.org), World Wildlife Fund (http://www.panda.org), The Wildlands Project (http://www.twp.org) and Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (http://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.aspx). Working nationally are the Defenders of Wildlife (http://www.defenders.org) and the National Audubon Society (http://www.audubon.org). Organizations such as the New England Wildflower Society (http://www.newfs.org), the Massachusetts Audubon Society (http://www.massaudubon.org) and the Appalachian Mountain Club (http://www.outdoors.org) work at the regional level; and a host of local land trust organizations and watershed and pond associations are preserving biodiversity at the local level. In summary, many efforts are underway to protect species and ecosystems, but truly, it is only a start.
The current rate of biodiversity loss (100 to 1000 species per million, Wilson 2002, p. 100-101) has been called the sixth great extinction (Levin and Leakey 1996). Despite our new scientific understanding and action within governments and NGO’s, most activities that induce the loss of biodiversity continue (Loh et al. 2002, Jenkins 2003), suggesting that the trajectories for preservation are not encouraging. While there has been clarification about the causes of biodiversity loss, it is difficult to steer the cultural ship in a different direction (Czech 2000).
Consider the issue of habitat loss on a local level in New England. Throughout our region, freshwater habitats are being degraded or disappearing because of water pumping for human consumption, filling for development, pollution from non point sources, or the introduction of non-native species. Forested habitats have returned in some areas of New England, but people are converting forests and agriculture lands for more intensive human use in other parts of the region. In Massachusetts alone, there is a net loss of open lands of about 40 acres a day mainly due to expansion of suburbs (Breunig, 2003). Open space is being converted to new housing subdivisions and schools, to soccer fields and landfills as expanding populations and our consumer-oriented habits demand more of nature for humans. At the state and community level, people have endorsed the concept of “Smart Growth”, accepting that growth will occur and opting to try to minimize its impacts. Nonetheless, our individualist society does not put a premium on community infrastructure. By in large, we have the technical expertise to develop other solutions for communication and transportation, etc. but not the vision and political will. The notion that the world is getting “Full” has not penetrated society’s consciousness (Daly, 1996 p. 49).
The requisite changes that will preserve biodiversity are likely to develop from a shift in world views that could emanate from societal discourse on subjects as diverse as economics, education, public health, religion, or security. Currently, research is being conducted on how world views change within a wide variety of disciplines such as business, economics and systems thinking (Wander 2000, Chapter 5, Meadows 2001, McElroy 2002). The pathway to change discussed in this article is rooted in our deep intellectual and emotional connection to biodiversity that E.O. Wilson has labelled the Biophilia Hypothesis (Wilson 1986, Kellert and Wilson 1995, Kellert 1997).
In America today, the opportunities to interact with the natural world are becoming more limited as our society loses its rural nature. One set of activities that might induce a revised world view is to make it much easier for everyone to identify and learn about the organisms in his local environment. The rationale is that familiarity will lead to the development of empathy of non-human species. Ehrenfeld’s quotation at the beginning of the article makes the point specifically for America.
The Electronic Field Guide (EFG) Project (http://efg.cs.umb.edu:8080/efgKeys/html/index.html) has three main goals:
There are many other organizations and groups that are taking similar approaches in that they are crafting EFGs by hand or for specific taxa (Stevenson et al. 2003, see table 1 http://www.consecol.org/vol7/iss1/art3/table1.html for birding software and Appendix 1 http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol7/iss1/art3/append1.html for internet sites that have put up field guides on line.) The commercial site, eNature (http://www.enature.com/) is the most complete source of on-line field guides at the present time.
Most of the electronic tools that are currently available are not made for use in the field. This is because the screens are small on PDAs and other handheld devices. However, change is occurring as some people are putting EFGs on Palm OS®, Pocket PC, and Windows® CE Handheld PC handhelds, using the document reader iSilo™ software (http://www.isilo.com/) or documents based on HTML using software called iSiloX™ (http://www.isilo.com/).
For recording observations the CyberTracker’s custom Palm Pilot software is being used by mammalogists. Birders have a wide variety of options (Stevenson et al. 2003, table 1 http://www.consecol.org/vol7/iss1/art3/table1.html). Recently, the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell put up its online eBird site so people could record and archive their bird observations (http://www.ebird.org/content/).
A fundamental premise is that field guides are easier to use than taxonomic keys. (The origin and history of field guides are discussed in Stevenson et al. 2003. Table 2 of that paper contrasts features of keys and guides.) Taxonomic keys were used by Linnaeus and formulated as a binomial decision tree structure (= dichotomous key) in which the user must be able to distinguish each character at every step and make the correct choice or else the user will end up in the wrong place in the key. One online example for mosses is given at http://members.aol.com/legion86/MOSS1.html (This key is based on A. J. Grout's Moss Flora of North America and Lauren D. Howard’s The Moss Flora of New England, New York, and Southeastern Canada as described at http://members.aol.com/legion86/MOSSPRE.html by Ian Worley.) A limitation for the use of dichotomous keys is that users make wrong choices but do not realize it until several steps further on in the key. They become lost and do not know where they erred. Modern taxonomic identification software such as Delta (http://biodiversity.uno.edu/delta/) and LucID (http://www.lucidcentral.com/), offer many improvements in the underlying data structures, computation methods and user interfaces. They can operate on more than one character at a time, show a list of remaining species that fit the selected criterion, indicate the remaining character(s) that optimize identification and use expert system technologies. However, the basic approach of using elimination by characters to identify species remains unchanged.
The use of keys is also made more difficult by the technical language used by experts that facilitates the precise description or biological objects. Because the terms are unknown to all but the experts, they represent a significant barrier rather than a tool for most users. For example in the moss key cited above, phrases such as “strongly complanate”, “hyaline apices”, “subulate-setaceous”, and “double sheathing laminae” must be decoded by non-specialists before a choice can be made. Without coaching and significant persistence, people often just give up
In contrast, field guide identification is mostly based on comparing a specimen to an image (see http://www.cs.umb.edu/efg/FlowerShow/, [the show will proceed with out clicking any buttons]). People do not need to know the anatomy of the taxon. Instead they can use a simple paradigm of “it looks likes” to identify species. To get a sense of how this works, follow the link to the Electronic Field Guide Image Identification Exercise. After you complete the exercise, you will be directed to a commentary link about the 10 images. To make the experience most effective, first make a list from 1 to 10 in which you can write down a name for what you see and make notes about the image. You should spend about 30 seconds to one minute on each image.
Now explore two of the EFGs from the EFG Project. An Electronic Field Guide to Macroinvertebates of small streams of Eastern Massachusetts by Fred SaintOurs and the EFG team at http://efg.cs.umb.edu/streamsKey (and selecting appropriate pulldown menues) and the Ithomid butterflies of Costa Rica by William Haber and the EFG team can be linked off of the front page of the EFG project (http://efg.cs.umb.edu:8080/efgKeys/html/index.html).
The main take-home message of the EFG Project is that people are very good at making identifications without consciously identifying characters. If an identification tool can quickly provide images of closely species, the identification process can be much simpler and more direct. This is not to say that care is unnecessary. I have noticed that people really want to name species and that they will ignore observations that indicate differences between an unknown picture and an identified reference picture in favor of the named image. The EFG Project believes that an essential step in the identification process is to present users with a choice of similar species after they have selected their answer. By taking this last step of comparing one’s choice with other species with which it can be confused according to experts, one can make what we call a positive identification.
A second underlying premise of the EFG Project is that electronic field guides allow more flexibility in their production and use than paper field guides. For instance, standard field guides are constrained by economic considerations. If large numbers can be sold, then high quality color drawings or photographs can be reproduced at a cost the consumer can afford. A large number of sales requires that the topic be popular with the public (e.g. birds, butterflies, mammals, wild flowers) and that the geographic scope be broad. Nevertheless, the number and size of the illustrations in paper guides must be limited.
Some of the advantages of EFGs relative to standard paper field guides are that EFGs:
Despite the advantages outlined here, we are just beginning to see people using digital tools in the field. As noted above, the screen size and program are still limited. As in most areas of natural history, the birding community is leading the way in using personal digital assistants such as Palm Pilot. The Cyber-Tracker software built for a palm Pilot with a GPS unit (http://www.cybertracker.org/index.html), an approach that originated in South Africa, is now been incorporated into programs in North America
Environmental monitoring projects that use volunteer help of amateurs seem to have originated in England, where such projects are called recording schemes and cover a wide variety of taxa (see http://www.brc.ac.uk/brcSchemes.asp?schemeChoice=47 and http://www.sciref.org/links/EntSoc/recschem.htm ) NGO’s seem to be the primary organizing bodies. These efforts have produced important databases and documents that guide biodiversity conservation in England (British Trust for Ornithology http://www.bto.org/bbs/results/latest_results.htm, Botanical Society of the British Isles http://www.bsbi.org.uk/, Asher et al 2001).
In Canada, the same kind of activities are undertaken through the auspices of Ecological Monitoring and Assessment Network (EMAN, http://www.emanrese.ca/eman/,) the Canada Environmental Monitoring Networking (http://www.ccmn.ca/english/) that is a collaboration between the government, and NGOs including the Canadian Nature Federation (http://www.cnf.ca/). The establishment of a good collection of Electronic Field Guides could greatly enhance the Biodiversity discovery, monitoring, and restoration as well as improve science literacy.
In the United States, the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell (http://www.birds.cornell.edu/) has taken the leading in developing “citizen science” projects as citizen-based environmental projects are often called (http://www.birds.cornell.edu/LabPrograms/CitSci/index.html). There are many such other projects (Stevenson et al. 2003), that exist with the English and Canadian programs because:
Cornell has been a leader in applying computer and Internet technologies to collect, organize, analyze and report the results of citizen science efforts. The Great Backyard Bird Count (http://www.birdsource.org/gbbc/toc_page.html) of 2003 had over 48,000 checklists submitted, observed 512 species and counted more than 4.2 million birds.
The Internet is opening up new possibilities for sharing biodiversity information. It offers a new methodology that can readily engage a wide range of amateurs and students in monitoring programs. In addition to basic biodiversity monitoring, other areas of high priority should include recording phonological data to understand climate change and mapping invasive species to judge the impacts of invaders on native species and communities. Rapid advancements in digital technologies such as hand held computers, printers, and digital cameras will aid citizen science programs.
DBI-9808462, DBI-0111540, and DBI-0113058 grants from the National Science Foundation to UMass Boston, Robert D. Stevenson and Robert A. Morris, Principle Investigators, have made this work possible. A grant from the Massachusetts Environmental Trust to UMass Boston funded the development of An Electronic Field Guide to Macroinvertebates of small streams of Eastern Massachusetts by Fred SaintOurs and the EFG team http://efg.cs.umb.edu/streamsKey.
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