Bringing the lab to the field: The benefits and pitfalls of spatially and temporally distributed in situ data for scientific reasoning

Abstract:

With advances in technology, the structure of scientific data collection and the demands placed on human scientists will undoubtedly change. Technologies that offer new forms of in situ data for field research, like robots, have the potential to transform and advance data collection practices beyond existing expert capabilities. In situ data brings the lab to the field, providing scientists the opportunity to reason about complex geologic processes on site and make real-time adjustments to data collection strategies. Technologies that offer in situ data can also be leveraged as decision support systems that package and present data to users in a manner that improves processing fluency, and can provide guidance in the form of behavioral nudges to avoid biases in interpretation. In this presentation, we describe the benefits and pitfalls of in situ data based on observations made during field work with a terrestrial robot and research with geoscience experts using a simulated data collection decision task.

In both the simulated task and during actual field work, geoscientists were asked to evaluate a hypothesis by collecting environmental data using a mobile robot. They reported an initial sampling strategy that was executed by the robot, and measurement data were provided in real-time – at any point, geoscientists were able to stop the robot and change their sampling strategy or make a conclusion about the hypothesis. One clear benefit of in situ data was that geoscientists did take advantage to dynamically adjust initial sampling strategies. However, a pitfall of these adjustments was that they were often spatially or temporally biased.