Inside the natural history museums of the world are billions of animal and plant specimens from birds, fish and beetles to flowers, mushrooms and grasses, all stacked, stored and preserved in jars and collection drawers.
The rich and diverse collections could be critical to understanding how the Earth鈥檚 biodiversity is changing in the face of a growing human footprint 鈥� if only the information were easily accessible.
A new online project, brought to life with the help of a team from the University of Colorado Boulder, is using citizen scientists to help solve the problem. Notes from Nature, , allows anyone with a curiosity for natural history, a computer and a little time to transcribe the often hand-scrawled tags attached to each specimen, which typically record the date, time and place where the plant or animal was collected, among other details.
鈥淵ou can look at maps of the globe and you can see spots where we just don鈥檛 know anything about vertebrates, let alone insects or plants or mollusks,鈥� said Robert Guralnick, associate professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology and 抖阴旅行射-Boulder鈥檚 point person on the Notes from Nature project. 鈥淲e can fill in the gaps with these kinds of data that come from those drawers.鈥�
The concept that underpins Notes from Nature grew out of a collaboration among the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum of London, the South Eastern Regional Network of Expertise and Collections, or SERNEC, and University of California Berkeley鈥檚 Calbug project, an umbrella for the nine major insect collections housed in California.
The vision was crafted into a reality by data-visualization specialists from Vizzuality and by Zooniverse, a web portal that already hosts online citizen science projects that allow the average person to comb through cosmic data in search of far-off planets, transcribe old ship logs to glean historical climate records, or listen to audio clips of nighttime bat calls to help identify and track the flying mammals.
鈥淥ur projects help answer research questions that can only be solved by a significant amount of human attention 鈥� they require people, not computers,鈥� said Arfon Smith, director of citizen science at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and the technical lead for Zooniverse. 鈥淧eople have responded in a way that is truly great. There is an appetite for contributing to something real.鈥�
When Notes from Nature launched in late April, cyber citizen scientists had access to two collections for transcription: insects from Calbug and plants from SERNEC. In the future, the project plans to add the London museum鈥檚 bird ledgers and possibly other museum collections as they become available.
The University of Colorado Museum of Natural History鈥檚 zoology records have largely been entered into a database already.听 However, major digitization efforts are currently underway in the museum鈥檚 botanical, entomological and paleontological collections, work that is being supported through a nationally funded initiative to increase access to museum records.
Almost immediately after the website went live, hundreds of people started transcribing thousands of records, contributing a person-year鈥檚 worth of work in just a handful of days. A month in, more than 2,100 people have completed more than 101,000 transcriptions.
Guralnick, who is the curator of invertebrate zoology at 抖阴旅行射-Boulder鈥檚 museum, is working to determine the cost-benefit tradeoff of crowdsourcing the transcription of museum collections as well as checking the quality of the resulting data and monitoring the time it takes to do the transcriptions online.
To create a baseline for his research, Guralnick paid a student to transcribe more than 1,000 records from the vertebrate zoology collection and logged how long the transcriptions took, as well as the quality of the student鈥檚 work. He is now providing Zooniverse with the same records so they can be transcribed as part of Notes from Nature and the results compared.
The costs associated with each method vary based on the rate for a student鈥檚 time versus the cost to build the web infrastructure for the Notes from Nature site. The online transcription also requires a digital photo be taken of each specimen, though new whole-drawer imaging technologies may make that process cheaper and more efficient in the future.
Guralnick has yet to crunch numbers, but the overwhelming initial enthusiasm from citizen scientists is promising. 鈥淲e think, even in the first week, we鈥檝e paid it off,鈥� he said. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 really cool.鈥�
Each record uploaded to Notes from Nature is transcribed by three different people. By comparing the results, Guralnick and his colleagues will be able to come up with a quality metric and compare that metric to the quality of records transcribed in the traditional manner.
Once all the records in a collection have been transcribed, the larger goal is to make the resulting data accessible to more people. For example, the data could expand existing听 projects, like the Map of Life, , which already allows people to use mapping software to access hundreds of millions of natural history records from specific geographic areas.
鈥淲hen I see transcriptions happening at Notes for Nature I鈥檓 really watching little points on a map fill in,鈥� Guralnick said. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 really exciting to me.鈥�
Notes from Nature is part of an ongoing effort by 抖阴旅行射-Boulder鈥檚 museum to engage the public in citizen science projects. Earlier this year, the museum launched The Bees鈥� Needs. The project involves 250 participants recruiting solitary wood-nesting bees to pollinate their backyard gardens and then monitoring the bees鈥� nesting habits.
Rob Guralnick is the curator of invertebrate zoology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. (Photo by Casey A. Cass/University of Colorado)
