Via Oracle, an interesting look at how technology has facilitated the world’s largest, most comprehensive longitudinal collection of data on any wild gorilla population—and made it available to the larger scientific and educational communities via the cloud:
Fifty years ago, Dian Fossey climbed into the remote mountains of Rwanda to study the area’s endangered gorillas. Today, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGFI) is using cutting-edge data collection and study tools to further her work and ensure the survival and revival of the species.
Urged on by legendary archaeologist Louis Leakey and her own growing interest in the great apes, Fossey began carefully chronicling the gorillas’ behavior—day after day—for years. Her observations eventually made her one of the most influential primatologists in the world—and made her subjects famous as well.
“What she brought to bear on conservation was the sense that you can’t do it for a little while. You have to be there for a sustained length of time. You must be there all day, every day. It needs to be continuous,” says Clare Richardson, president emeritus of the DFGFI. Fossey’s data, and the attention it brought to gorillas, lends them a distinction both encouraging and alarming: It is the only population of great apes in the world that has grown, doubling in size from 240 to 480 individuals during the past five decades.
“When [Dian Fossey] first went to Rwanda, the popular opinion of gorillas was King Kong, a ferocious beast,” says Tara Stoinski, president, CEO, and chief scientific officer for the DFGFI. “By getting to know each of those gorillas individually, by studying their families and seeing how much they are like us, she was able to change the world’s opinion. Their nickname now is ‘gentle giant,’ which is much more appropriate. She was just one person, but she literally changed the course of history for a species.”
Now, with Oracle’s funding and technology, Rwanda’s great apes are not the only ones who can benefit from Fossey’s legacy of data collection and analysis. Scientists researching a wide range of animals around the globe will also be able to more easily collect and manage the data they need.
A Long-Term Commitment Pays Off
Oracle’s involvement with the DFGFI began after company founder Larry Ellison saw the 1988 Fossey biopic Gorillas in the Mist and was impressed by her life of dedication and sacrifice. Oracle became one of the first US for-profit companies to take a leadership role in the protection of mountain gorillas and is the fund’s longest-term corporate supporter.
“That’s a very long time for a small conservation NGO to be operating, particularly in a part of the world that has faced a lot of challenges. Three decades of support from Oracle has let us be on the ground, day in and day out, that whole time,” says Stoinski. And that continuous presence has been key to the recovery of a species that was once expected to become extinct before the year 2000.
According to Colleen Cassity, executive director of Oracle Corporate Citizenship, working with the fund has also provided an opportunity for three branches of Oracle philanthropy to work together: Oracle Giving supports the DFGFI with cash and technology grants; the Oracle Education Foundation uses data sets from the fund to show students how to extract knowledge from data and visualize it; and Oracle Volunteers coach those classes.
“By working with real scientific field data, the students discover what data can tell them about the real world and then find answers to real-world questions. It’s a beautiful synthesis of three different threads of Oracle’s philanthropy, all focused on developing that next generation of conservationists,” says Cassity.
A New Approach to Wildlife Data Collection and Management
Four years ago, Oracle’s investment in the organization took a new turn. Fund leaders asked Oracle for a technology investment to transform the way its scientists collected and managed data. The resulting effort caused a cascade of changes, empowering not only the fund’s field researchers but also providing a downloadable app that any researcher in the world could use for any animal population, wild or captive. The collaboration also made the fund’s data—the world’s largest, most comprehensive longitudinal collection of data on any wild gorilla population—available to the larger scientific and educational communities.
“We’re an international organization, so having our data in the cloud is great for us because it means that people working in Rwanda can go in and enter that data that day, then scientists can go look at that data and see what they’ve seen and start using it,” says Stoinski.
Before the technology partnership, field scientists wrote their observations in notebooks during the day and then would transfer the data into a computer later—a time-intensive and error-prone process. Now scientists enter data directly into a hand-held tablet and upload to Oracle Database Cloud. “Mountain gorillas are critically endangered. There are about 880 of them left on the planet, so we want to have data in real time that we can use to see if there’s a conservation threat. Having the data up in the cloud really helps,” says Stoinski.
The first part of the project involved moving 50 years of field data into Oracle Database in the Cloud. Oracle Senior Principal Consultant Ritu Srivastava led the development team and worked closely with researchers at the DFGFI’s headquarters in Atlanta, and with systems administrators in Rwanda. First, Srivastava’s team migrated much of the historical data into the cloud, preserving it and making it available for further analysis. During the next phase, Srivastava’s team integrated Oracle R into Oracle Database, providing a platform for scientists to use the open-source R statistical programming language to create sophisticated graphical visualizations—a labor of love for the Oracle team, says Srivastava.
Once the legacy data was in the cloud, the next step was supporting the development of an app for researchers to use while observing the gorillas, enabling them to enter data directly into tablets connected to Oracle Database Cloud. Oracle provided key funding for the app development, which is free on iTunes.
The app isn’t specific to gorillas–it can be modified for use on any animal. “That’s been part of the challenge with other data collection apps,” says Stoinski. “They’ve been designed specifically for one type of animal or one species, and we worked really hard to make this very easy to modify for whatever animal you want to work with.”
Fostering the Next Generation of Conservationists
Beyond empowering scientists, this new data is inspiring the conservationists of tomorrow. “One of the most exciting parts of my job is getting people excited about gorillas, particularly young people,” says Stoinski. “We host every single biology student from the national university in Rwanda at our center every year—we teach classes, take them to see wildlife, show them how to collect conservation data. We also work with groups here in the States and with the Oracle Education Foundation to get young students to understand what’s happening to these animals in the wild.”
What does the future hold? According to Stoinski, “We must continue our on-the-ground protection work—gorillas are among the world’s most endangered animals and so ensuring their long-term survival is still a very important need. In addition, the continued work with the next generation of scientists is the future of conservation, getting them excited about science and how you use science to make real-world decisions. We would like to see that grow and strengthen, particularly for the African students we work with to ensure that they’re getting top-of-the-line mentorship so when they go into positions in their government or other NGOs, they’re really well-equipped to be leaders in their communities.”
“Baba Dioum, a Senegalese conservationist, said, ‘We will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught,’” says Cassity. “That’s why it is so special for us in the Oracle Educational Foundation to help students understand the fund’s work and know the gorillas as unique individuals.” Cassity believes that there’s room in the world for profitable commerce—and also for doing good without reward.
“Gorillas are so like us—98% genetically identical—that they can teach us about ourselves, the world we share, and how we fit into it. We don’t want to live in a world without gorillas.”
Via the Smithsonian Magazine, an interesting report on the use of aerial imagery to scan aerial imagery and pinpoint the locations of fracking wastewater ponds in Pennsylvania:
Ever since the natural gas boom took off in Pennsylvania in 2006, some people living near the drilling rigs have complained of headaches, gastrointestinal ailments, skin problems and asthma. They suspect that exposure to the chemicals used in the drilling practice called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, triggers the symptoms. But there’s a hitch: the exact locations of many active fracking sites remain a closely guarded secret.
Brian Schwartz, an environmental epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and his colleagues have teamed up with Geisinger Health System, a health services organization in Pennsylvania, to analyze the digital medical records of more than 400,000 patients in the state in order to assess the impacts of fracking on neonatal and respiratory health.
While the scientists will track where these people live, says Schwartz, state regulators cannot tell them where the active well pads and waste pits are located. Officials at Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) say that they have simply never compiled a comprehensive list.
So the Johns Hopkins researchers turned to a small nonprofit called SkyTruth, which scrutinizes satellite and other aerial imagery to figure out what is happening down here on Earth. The scientists traveled to the group’s headquarters in West Virginia in September 2013 to ask SkyTruth to help them locate Pennsylvania’s fracking wastewater ponds.
Fracking is a process in which a slurry of water mixed with sand and chemical lubricants is pumped underground at high pressure to shatter shale rock and release the natural gas imbedded within it. A portion of the spent fracking liquid shoots back up the well bore and needs to be disposed of. This “flowback” is laden with up to 40 different industrial chemicals and is often radioactive from its exposure to elements, such as radium and thorium, underground. While some of the tainted water is treated and then discharged into local rivers and streams, much of it gets stored in large plastic-lined impoundment ponds. The ponds waft a noxious chemical odor that may be responsible for respiratory problems in nearby residents.
To pinpoint the location of these ponds, SkyTruth launched a project called FrackFinder. They enlisted more than 200 volunteers in public meetings and on social media from as far away as Japan, who have collectively spent thousands of hours poring over satellite images of Pennsylvania’s bucolic landscape. SkyTruth trained its recruits online and with specially designed apps to distinguish regularly-shaped waste ponds from natural ponds and wetlands. Ten different volunteers examined each image to ensure the accuracy of the data.
SkyTruth just released its crowdsourced map, which shows over 500 fracking ponds in Pennsylvania, up from a mere 11 located in photographs taken in 2005.
Volunteers for the FrackFinder project pinpointed the locations of fluid impoundments in 2005, 2008, 2010 and 2013, based on aerial photography taken in those years.
SkyTruth is the brainchild of John Amos, a geologist who began his career analyzing satellite images to advise oil and gas companies where to drill. He noticed that the photos revealed a lot more than just promising geological formations. Amos saw oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Australia and massive clear cuts hacked out of the vast boreal forests of Siberia—deforestation rivaling what is happening in the Amazon in scale.
“What really pushed me over the edge emotionally,” says Amos, “was looking at satellite imagery of western Wyoming, where I got my Master’s degree.” He was shocked to see that an area that had been pristine rangeland when he was going to school during the mid-1980s was, just 10 years later, “a spider’s web of drilling sites, pipelines and access roads.” Public lands had been totally converted for industrial use.
“I wondered why these pictures weren’t on the front pages of the major newspapers of the world,” says Amos. “People need to see this.”
When the first Landsat satellite was launched in 1972, NASA sold single images to interested parties for upwards of $4,000 each. That put the pictures out of reach for all but a few deep-pocketed corporate and academic researchers. Today, the entire Landsat archive of thousands of high-resolution photographs is available free for anyone to download.
This has proven to be a bonanza for citizen science groups like SkyTruth. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, some elected officials claimed that “not one drop of oil” had been spilled from the offshore infrastructures in the Gulf. But SkyTruth used the latest radar-satellite images to document an oil slick covering more than 270 square miles that emanated from known drilling platforms and pipelines—a finding later confirmed by the U.S. Coast Guard.
Five years later, in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf, SkyTruth estimated, based on the size of the visible oil plume, that the spill was at least 20 times as large as what BP was claiming at the time.
SkyTruth is the first environmental whistleblower to focus exclusively on sleuthing from the sky. The group’s motto is: “If you can see it, you can change it.” They distribute aerial photographs of everything from mountaintop removal to oil sands development and urban sprawl to the press and environmental groups, and share them with the public through social media. Revealing the ecological destruction that humans are wreaking on the planet, however, is only one aspect of the group’s mission. They also want to get people more engaged.
SkyTruth is the first environmental whistleblower to focus exclusively on sleuthing from the sky.
“Our volunteers get to see what fracking in their area actually looks like. It is an informational experience,” says David Manthos, director of the FrackFinder project. “For some, SkyTruthing may be a stepping stone to writing their elected officials, or putting on waders and going out in the field to take water quality measurements.”
Brent Newman, a graduate student in geography at the University of Maryland, volunteered and was stunned to see how fracking has transformed large swaths of rural Pennsylvania into industrial landscapes. “Just to see the sheer number of fracking ponds was alarming,” says Newman. Motivated by this eye-opening experience, he is currently conducting his own independent research on deforestation due to hydraulic fracturing for his Master’s degree.
People like Brent Newman are part of a growing movement of citizen scientists who are stepping in where government and the shale-gas industry have fallen short, according to Kirk Jalbert, a doctoral student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Jalbert, who has been doing research on several water-monitoring groups in Pennsylvania, distinguishes between two very different types of citizen science.
“You might get an academic researcher who asks 100 or 200 people to parse through data and tell him where DNA strands connect,” says Jalbert. “But that doesn’t produce engaged citizens, it teaches people to connect dots. Producing engaged citizens means having people frame and pursue the questions that they want answered.”
Questions like, how is fracking affecting my water supply?
“The majority of the participants [in the fracking monitoring groups] don’t see themselves as activists,” according to Jalbert. “People tell me, ‘you know I grew up in this county, I swam in these streams, my kids swim in these streams, there’s a gas pad that’s going in on the ridge up there, and I want to make sure that they don’t screw up my water.’”
Now that the SkyTruth fracking map is completed, the Johns Hopkins epidemiological study is gearing up. They are now checking whether asthma patients who live near natural gas sites have suffered exacerbations of their illness. The researchers hope to have preliminary results on this within the next few months.
For SkyTruth, the investigation of fracking in Pennsylvania is only the beginning. The group recently launched a partnership with Walsh University in North Canton, Ohio, where volunteers will be mapping the “ecological footprint” of shale drilling, or how much forest was cleared and agricultural land converted to industrial use. Pending adequate funding, Texas— with 6,000 oil and gas fracking wells, the largest number of any state—is on their radar to tackle next.
“It’s a big planet,” says Amos. But looked at from above, we come to recognize it as home. “Time and again, we’ve seen how pictures motivate people to pay attention, to care about a place, and—hopefully—to take action if they see something they don’t like.”
Via MIT’s Center for Civic Media, details on an interesting project that
Over the last several months, Civic has been working on the Open Water Project, which aims to develop and curate a set of low-cost, open-source tools enabling communities to collect, interpret, and share their water quality data. Open Water is an initiative of Public Lab, a community that uses inexpensive DIY techniques to change how people see the world in environmental, social, and political terms (read more about Public Lab and the Open Water initiative here). The motivation behind Open Water derives partly from the fact that most water quality monitoring uses expensive, proprietary technology, limiting the accessibility of water quality data. Inexpensive, open-source approaches to water quality monitoring could enable groups ranging from watershed managers to homeowners to more easily collect and share water quality data.
As part of the Open Water Project, we’ve looked at other open-source water quality monitoring tools and initiatives (you can read more about those initiatives on this Public Lab research note, “What’s Going on In Water Monitoring”) and we’ve had meetups to talk about water quality and monitoring strategies (here’s a summary of an awesome water quality primer with Jeff Walker). We’ve also been working on development of the Riffle — the “Remote, Independent, and Friendly Field Logger Electronics”. The Riffle is a low-cost, open-source hardware device that will measure some of the most common water quality parameters using a design that makes it possible for anyone to build, modify, and deploy water quality sensors in their own neighborhood. Specifically, the Riffle will measure conductivity, temperature, and depth, which can serve as indicators for potential pollutants. Eventually the Riffle will be able to fit in a plastic water bottle.
A few weeks ago, Public Lab received generous support from Rackspace for an Open Water event in July, and Catherine D’Ignazio, Don Blair, and I decided we’d host a workshop focused on exploring conductivity as an important and widely-used water quality parameter. In addition to facilitating a group discussion on the topic, we hoped we could work together on prototyping simple, inexpensive and creative ways of measuring conductivity.
We started the workshop with a discussion around water quality monitoring and community support structures, including what a distributed water quality monitoring effort might look like (and some of the associated challenges) and strategies for developing community support (e.g. ‘tool libraries’ that include water quality monitoring tools). We also talked about the ways in which inexpensive, non-proprietary sensors might allow for new and important questions to be asked and answered in water quality, and how we might calibrate open hardware sensors.
Next, we had a mini lecture on conductivity measurements from Craig Versek and dove into creating a resistance-dependent oscillation circuit using the 555 timer (a fairly simple circuit). The idea behind the circuit is that oscillation frequency of the output will increase as the resistance value decreases (as a result, an LED will blink at different rates or a piezo buzzer will click at different rates). In our case, the resistance value derives from the water source connected to the circuit; thus, the LED blinking (or piezo buzzing) corresponds with conductivity (inversely, resistance) of the water.
Participants breadboard the conductivity circuit.
Before the workshop, Craig Versek had measured out various amounts of table salt in order for us to be able to prepare water samples whose salinity matched some real world examples (here’s a table of salinity values for common water sources). After building the circuits, we explored how solutions of varying salinity affected the rate of oscillation in our circuits, by watching the LED blink rate change as we dipped the probe into the various samples. We then tried replacing the LED with a piezo buzzer and listening to the results. Some folks in the workshop even went so far as to connect the circuit via audio jack to a computer, and then use an open-source, browser-based pitch detector to associate specific pitches with water samples.
By the end of the workshop, we had:
built simple, cheap 555 conductivity meters on a breadboard
demonstrated that we could distinguish solutions of varying salinity from one another using this circuit
added an audio component to the circuit via a piezo buzzer, allowing one to ‘hear’ the conductivity of solutions
wired up an audio jack to the circuit, so that the resultant audio could be recorded on a smartphone or laptop
tested out browser-based pitch detection software — different levels of conductivity can now be assessed using only the browser!
There’s much more to explore in conductivity measurements and in water quality monitoring in general, and we’ll be hosting more Open Water workshops to explore open-source water quality monitoring techniques. To learn more about the project, visit Public Lab’s Open Water project page.
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New technical innovations such as location-tracking devices, GPS and satellite communications, remote sensors, laser-imaging technologies, light detection and ranging” (LIDAR) sensing, high-resolution satellite imagery, digital mapping, advanced statistical analytical software and even biotechnology and synthetic biology are revolutionizing conservation in two key ways: first, by revealing the state of our world in unprecedented detail; and, second, by making available more data to more people in more places. The mission of this blog is to track these technical innovations that may give conservation the chance – for the first time – to keep up with, and even get ahead of, the planet’s most intractable environmental challenges. It will also examine the unintended consequences and moral hazards that the use of these new tools may cause.Read More
