Advancing Biodiversity Monitoring by Directly Integrating Remote Sensing Data with Citizen Science Platforms

Abstract:

As scientists attempt to cope with the explosion of remote sensing data and harness it for biodiversity monitoring, classification of complex biological data can be a serious rate limiting step. In other disciplines seeking to classify complex imagery, such as astronomy, camera traps, and historical document processing, citizen science has provided a tremendous tool to generate an enormous number of classifications in short periods of time. In addition, engaging in citizen science provides a direct connection between research and the public, engaging STEM enthusiasts from all ages and walks of life. Creating an imagery set from remote sensing data that is appealing to citizen scientists alongside tools that allow them to easily classify imagery can be an onerous multistep process with multiple points of failure. Here we present Theia, a new direct data pre-processing and upload pipeline for NASA Landsat data into the Zooniverse platform. Theia, in combination with the Zooniverse’s free Project Builder tools (see zooniverse.org/lab), allows for the rapid creation and maintenance of Zooniverse-based citizen science projects using Landsat data. The Zooniverse also provides access to an existing crowd of over 2 million citizen scientists worldwide. We highlight the use of Theia with FloatingForests.org, a project that crowdsources the analysis of Landsat data in order to build a thirty year time series of giant kelp forest data around the globe. We discuss the difficulties in building Floating Forests before Theia, how to use and create a project, and the changes in efficiency and success generated by migrating our project to Theia. We also highlight the ability to plug directly into visualization tools for citizen scientists to get immediate access to maps of kelp forests classified by citizen scientists, as well as time series maps and animations coupled with environmental data layers to facilitate exploration. This pipeline that fuses NASA data with the power of Citizen Science opens up new possibilities for the scope and speed of remote sensing projects, and we welcome those who are interested to try it out.