Subj : Shore thing: The citizen science project that's in kids' hands To : All From : News Date : Wed Jun 12 2024 01:27 pm By Lucas de Jong, Seven Sharp Reporter 5:00am Kids love devices. So, one citizen science project is using new technology to map our coastal environment - and they're putting it in kids' hands. It's called photogrammetry, a process that replaces the traditional pen and paper in favour of a complex 3D interactive landscape that captures information in incredible detail. "What we want to be doing is getting photos from all different angles," said Arie Spyksma, a marine science research fellow at the University of Auckland and the man behind the technology. "There's a lot of overlap between the imagery, and then those overlapping images can all be stitched together into a three-dimensional model." The end product is an interactive snapshot in time - a moment that scientists can use to monitor species decline and landscape changes. "We can get kids out there collecting some of this data for us. We know that how it's been processed is accurate." Citizen science project It'd be impossible if we tried to map our coastline in detail - 15,000km of coastline stretch around New Zealand from the subtropical to the sub-antarctic. Instead, the focus for Marine Metreý is to look at one metre at a time. The citizen science project uses quadrants - it sounds fancy, but it's simply four one-metre pipes slapped together - to sample one small space in detail. "So one metre squared is a way of focusing people's attention - getting them to look closer," said Sally Carson from the New Zealand Marine Study Centre and the woman behind Marine Metreý. Since 2013, species, populations, and locations have been gathered in various parts of the country. Until now, it has been a basic game of identifying the species, counting its population and then entering the details into an online database. "We can't possibly have the scientists look everywhere. So we want it to develop a programme where we had a standardised method so that the data could be compared," said Carson. Let the kids do the counting At Te Atatu Intermediate, the students have been mapping their coastline for seven years using traditional methods. "They're the ones that know that shoreline best. They have to count, which is a challenge sometimes because there could be an awful lot of barnacles and muscles," said Carson. They have years of data that scientists can now access - information that would've once ended up in a teacher's desk drawer. Now, with photogrammetry, the process is that much easier. In less than 15 minutes, more than 50 pictures can be gathered, stitched together and made ready for analysis. "You know, kids are so used to digital content now that we need to be working out ways where we can bring that digital element along to how we're doing science as well," said Spyksma. It's a technology Spyksma's worked on for years while studying the sea floor and kina barons, but it was a chance conversation with one of his supporters that got it into the hands of school kids. The Live Ocean Foundation had been supporting his work since they learned about photogrammetry, and quickly, a meeting was set up between him and Carson. Back in the class If you were to mark photogrammetry's success on the kids' smiles, it would get an A+. Instead of static spreadsheets, the kids move around their class using augmented reality to explore the space. They can compare coastlines in Auckland to remote areas of the South Island. Most importantly, the information gathered on the seashore is now available to access anytime. "And if I have new questions 10 years down the track, I can't go back and look at a data sheet and get new information out of it," said Spyksma. "But on a photo, I can look for things that I may not have picked up while I was there at the time." Not just for kids While kids adapt to new technology quickly, it's an app that anyone can use. If you can take a picture - you can map a metre. "If we get the community and schools across New Zealand looking closely at the shoreline, we're going to have the best-understood shoreline of anywhere in the world," said Carson. The more information we collect as a country, the better we are prepared for understanding change. "Our environment is changing, there's no question. And so the more we know about what's normal now, the better we will plan for the future." --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A44 2020/02/04 (Windows/64) * Origin: S.W.A.T.S BBS Telnet swatsbbs.ddns.net:2323 (63:10/102) .