Projects

A friendly and free community helping to identify wildlife and share nature, iSpot is a citizen science project developed to help anyone learn about and engage with nature while sharing and building their wildlife identification skills. Supported by a diverse and growing online community of nature enthusiasts, iSpot has grown into a database of over 1.5 million photos posted with hundreds of thousands observations of species from a wide range of groups including amphibians and reptiles; birds; fungi and lichens; fish; invertebrates; mammals plants and other organisms.

Avant-garde computer science technologies are being used for Pollinator Citizen Science in Planting for Pollinators, which has evolved from the BeeWatch project: Natural Language Generation, Image Recognition, and Recommender Systems. These technologies help citizens become familiar with bumblebee identification, generate a better collective understanding of the distribution of these important pollinators within our country, and access species specific pollinator-friendly planting advice.

Blogging birds is a novel artificial intelligence program that generates creative texts to communicate telemetric data derived from satellite tags fitted to red kites – a medium-size bird of prey – as part of a species reintroduction program in the U.K. We address the challenge of communicating telemetric sensor data in real time by enriching it with meteorological and cartographic data, codifying ecological knowledge to allow creative interpretation of the behaviour of individual birds in respect to such enriched data, and dynamically generating informative and engaging data-driven blogs aimed at the general public.

The X-Polli:Nation project aims to get our communities buzzing. This National Geographic project shares (or ‘cross-pollinates’) approaches and tools between members of the public, scientists, technologists and educators in order to support pollinators, people and the practice of citizen science.

Treezilla is a free, online multi-purpose platform designed to support tree-related science projects as part of the Open Science Laboratory in the Science Faculty of the Open University. The objective is to create an online map of all the trees in the UK that can be used for 5 types of activity: Education, Outreach, Research, Inventory and Biological Surveillance.