Listening to the forest and its curators

Abstract

A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription.For more information, please contact eprints@nottingham.ac.uk Listening to the Forest and its Curators: Lessons Learnt from a Bioacoustic Smartphone Application Deployment ABSTRACTOur natural environment is complex and sensitive, and is home to a number of species on the verge of extinction. Surveying is one approach to their preservation, and can be supported by technology. This paper presents the deployment of a smartphone-based citizen science biodiversity application. Our findings from interviews with members of the biodiversity community revealed a tension between the technology and their established working practices. From our experience, we present a series of general guidelines for those designing citizen science apps.

Playful Campaigning

“…For example, Massuung et al developed mobile apps using two extrinsic motivation approaches pointsification and financial incentives in an effort to engage the local community in data collection and overcome public apathy towards environmental issues. Mobile and desktop-based applications have also leveraged gaming features to motivate the public to assist biodiversity professionals in surveying (Moran et al 2014) and classifying rare and endangered species (e.g. www.zooniverse.org).…”

“…In the past few years HCI has been increasingly involved in supporting and engaging with the environmental and sustainability agenda. Methods range from providing people with ways to monitor, collect information on, learn about, and make sense of their environment and the issues around it, to supporting organizations with ways to create awareness, persuade the public, disseminate information, and impact legislation regarding environmental issues (Froehlich et al 2009;Consolvo et al 2008;Foster et al 2010;Pousman et al 2008;Thieme et al 2012;Moran et al 2014). Whether a mobile app, a web service, a public display, a performance piece c or an online game, a major challenge to HCI for sustainability lies with how to engage the relevant communities in a dialogue that actually brings them to a point of reflection and possibly realisation regarding environmental issues.…”

The role of community science in orthopteran research

“…In the case of acoustic monitoring, data for many different species across taxa can be captured and analyzed from a single recording, a practice that could further utilize existing recordings, increase the rate of new data collection, decrease costs, and encourage collaboration (Jeliazkov et al 2016, Newson et al 2017. Smartphone technology also allows us to easily record data that is outside the normal human sensory range, which provides a means to detect species that might otherwise go unnoticed (Moran et al 2014). Community science acoustic monitoring is currently being used at a nationwide scale in some locations and taxa (e.g., FrogID (Rowley et al 2019, Rowley andCallaghan 2020); North American Breeding Bird Survey, USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center and Environment Canada's Canadian Wildlife Survey).…”

CrowdMonitor

“…Application areas for participatory sensing include, for example, GPS or speed data from cyclists to infer route and traffic noisiness [24], audio data from microphones to discover biodiversity [19] or to measure the air quality [14]. The presence of such multimodal sensors is enabling a broad range of possibilities through the automatic collection of sensor data.…”