Hi, Heidi,

     You ask a great question!

     We are two years into a three-year project + evaluation period, and so far we've focused our efforts on two sites: the Anacostia Watershed Society (a nonprofit in the Washington, DC area that conducts training for volunteer watershed stewards) and Reedy Creek Nature Center in Charlotte, NC.

     Watershed stewards first came up with some general projects--Watch Your Waterways and Runoff Rundown--and are just starting to experiment with putting up  photos and information about their individual capstone projects. For examples of these, you could go to nature-net.org, select Projects from the top, then select Grace Episcopal Capstone or Cheverly Residential Capstone. We are eager to see how people upload pictures and PDFs to help others see what they are trying to accomplish to manage stormwater through rain gardens, native plantings, etc. and will be watching this over the summer and fall.

     At Reedy Creek Nature Center, naturalists have suggested projects such as Turtle Tracking and Mushrooms to encourage visitors to focus their attention on some specific aspect of plant or animal life while in the park. There is also a more general Ask a Naturalist project for people to take a picture of something that puzzles them or engages their interest and ask a question about it so that naturalists can provide more information.

     With respect to your middle school youth, you might also take a look at the existing project, Seasonal Land Patch, in which a group of college students monitored a 10' by 10' foot plot of land over a season. They may find it interesting to contribute to this project AND to use the Design Ideas feature to make suggestions for enhancing the NatureNet technology as they use it.

     In general, I would say that projects that allow individuals or communities to monitor some environmental change over time can be well-supported by NatureNet. We also see that it is important to provide short, clear instructions and a compelling reason if other people are invited to contribute to a project. 

     We'll be watching this space through May 22 for new project ideas, and after that, people are welcome to submit them directly through the NatureNet app or website by taking a minute to set up an account and then entering a project name and brief (sentence or two) description under Design Ideas.

Betsy, This is a great question! First, thank you for watching our video and for the great review of the NatureNet App!  We at NatureNet are thrilled to hear that the app is a good fit for your data collecting as you wind up gardens/ag fields and move into fields/forests, and waterways in your local environment.

Now to your answering your question: You rightly point out that libraries would make great places for the large screen, which is an idea we have explored with local libraries on the Anacostia Watershed in Maryland.  We currently have large screen displays at the Reedy Creek Nature Center in North Carolina (visitor center & kiosk), and want to extend the same concept to users who live on the Anacostia Watershed in Maryland.  Please let us know if we can answer any more questions and how we can best serve your data collecting and sharing needs.  Also, you might have noticed that the app's design is crowdsourced, and so we depend on users to recommend new directions for development. In other words, we are completely community driven. For this reason we love to hear design ideas!

Hi, Sarah,

     Our research team has had early discussions about making the link with iNaturalist for those projects that involve animal and plant species, but at the moment, the data is being used by participants only.

     Naturalists at Reedy Creek Nature Center are interested in the local data related to caterpillars, mushrooms, turtles, etc., and our partner at Anacostia Watershed Society is inviting trained watershed stewards to use NatureNet to document their individual capstone projects related to stormwater management, both so he and other volunteers can see how the projects are shaping up and so community members can also get a map of what's going on in the Anacostia River watershed area.

     We are interested in how NatureNet might support community education and encourage more activity as core participants share their data with their own social networks. Let us know if you have other thoughts about data sharing, and thanks for your question.

Hi Claire,

NatureNet has a web app as well that mirrors a lot of the functionality of the mobile apps. You can check it out at nature-net.org to get an idea of what is possible.

Claire, Stephen is right! the website nature-net.org will give you an idea of what types of data are collected on the app.  I was wondering from your question though, if maybe you are also interested in aggregated data that you can use for research? If so, we plan to put that up soon. Currently, we are sharing some interesting visualizations of user activity on our research website at http://viz.nature-net.org/#/summary

To answer your question about kinds of data collected, Basically, users collect photos or pdfs around nature-based projects that are of interest to them, mostly in their local area.   Projects include rain gardens, storm water runoff rundown, watching our waterways, etc.  

Please let us know if Stephen and I have answered your questions, and thanks for stopping by!

Yes, thanks! That answers my question, and I'm going to go check out the web app. To clarify my questions, I'm mostly trying to understand the general functionality of the app. For example, once students or other science enthusiasts had contributed data through their photos or pdfs, how is that data then manipulated and analyzed to answer a research question (if that's a goal). Does the app support that? I'm off to the website to find out!

Claire, NatureNet collects different types of data including environmental data gathered through project submissions and design data that is gathered through the design idea section of the platform. Each data type is analyzed differently and for a different purpose. Each environmental project is different and when we are gathering and analyzing lots of data, for some of the projects community awareness and participation is the primary goal.
In addition to environmental activities, one of the NatureNet research questions is how community members could contribute to the design of the technology they use. To answer this question, we use a variation of design analysis methods including Protocol Analysis to study the design idea data posted by NatureNet users.  

Hi Claire. Great questions! I just wanted to add some thoughts to what my other presenters have said.   Because this is focused on community-driven environmental projects, one challenge for this is how to make the data available for local use by naturalists and community members.  This is especially true for our partners that have an action orientation, where community members aim to use this data for local projects (e.g. installing a rain garden), which is different from many other citizen science projects where the data is primarily aggregated for researcher use.  Right now, we only support in-app views of the data by location, project, and personal contributions, but are focused on working with our current partners to see what kinds of tools would best support their project and what features are best in-app versus as pipelines to external tools that they already know.   In-app visualization of the data was something that our Colorado team discussed early on, but it presents many challenges and future research opportunities beyond this grant. What visualizations best support action-driven projects versus research projects? How do you create a visualization that can handle when the data types are changing between projects and over time? Cleaning of data is one of the biggest steps. Can computing effectively do this or could you create an easy way for community members to select the data themselves? Several team members from this project also had a separate EAGER grant looking at the use of machine learning to highlight anomalies in citizen science data.  We found that a mixed human-computer approach was best, using the machine learning to highlight unusual events and people to determine whether this was incorrect data or interesting changes in the environment.   I would love to hear any further ideas you have for data manipulation and visualization, either through this discussion or you can contribute ideas directly in the design ideas section of our website: https://www.nature-net.org/ideas. Do you have a particular use in mind?

Betsy, just letting you know that I also do love this way of using the map feature to sensemake around safety issues that hikers may encounter while in nature.  You are right, issues are a great way to build community because people love to share information about things that are of concern to them! 

Jennifer and Elizabeth,

Thank you for your receptive thinking!  We are more apt to share info on what are our concerns and with information we can plan for those unexpected ventures.  The mailman keeps track locally of the family of bears that roam the side streets of downtown Hanover, NH.  He might not have time to take pictures, however the AT hikers line up at the Post Office for packages sent here.  The library and most of the community open their doors to AT hikers. 

 Thanks to your app, I  moved out from the computer screen on the rail trail this week, testing out cameras in our project with shots of the water conditions which are a bit odd this year as we move out of our drought conditions.  I may have “captured” a male Karner Blue butterfly, an endangered species! 

"... to share and protect" words of great depth, Betsy!  I recently heard a great presentation by a research scientist from citsci.org, on how they are building technology to be sensitive to those two needs you have identified here--sharing and protecting. You may want to keep an eye out for future developments on that site. I am not sure about the timeline on that particular goal, but its achievement will be a crucial step in environmental technology.  I share in Jenny's excitement for you, on your serendipitous encounter with an endangered species!