Washington University, the University of Arizona, University of California San Diego, and the University of Vermont are awarded collaborative grants to develop tools that support deeper integration of citizen scientists with a broader range of biological imaging projects. Our specific aims are to develop tools (1) to make it easier for volunteers with smart phones to capture calibrated imagery supporting quantitative data measurements, (2) to facilitate volunteer contributions to image analysis tasks with better interfaces and formal methods to validate and create consensus estimates from many responses, and (3) to foster long-term motivation and engagement within virtual communities through online environments that combine aesthetics, social networking and visualization tools. These tools will have an initial focus on problem domains including monitoring of urban re-forestation efforts and analysis of 3D biological and neurological imaging data at many different scales. It will produce a set of smart phone and web apps that will be available to the broader biological research community that require calibrated image capture and analysis, and will create an experimental web portal to engage virtual communities of volunteers and scientists collaborating to work on imaging problems.
The ImageQuest project will make it simpler for volunteers and scientists to engage in a much broader set of biological imaging research. Providing tools which enhance a volunteers ability to capture and analyze images relieves a technical burden on biologists trying to develop citizen science approaches. Making these tools smarter and more interactive encourages volunteers to contribute meaningfully to novel research questions, and building a virtual community around the volunteers and the scientists helps to recruit, motivate and retain long term participation of the public in scientific research.
Citizen Science is a research method where volunteers are included and encouraged to collect, annotate or help analyze data. The Imagequest project seeks to improve Citizen Science projects, by making it easier for Citizen Scientists to contribute more accurate image annotations and more calibrated imagery to projects. Citizen science is a growing field that promotes the broad dissemination of scientific questions and the scientific process, and having volunteers contribute more accurate data creates a richer interaction between the public, important research questions, and the scientific process. From a technical standpoint, the project developed specific tools to improve the ability of untrained users to define contours in biological image data, and improved the ability to combine multiple contours from different people into a consensus contour. The project also developed and optimized a smartphone app designed to make it easier for volunteers to take pictures that exactly align with previous pictures taken at the same location, and LIDAR analysis tools to find locations in urban areas that need pictures. A server and website make it easy to create new projects and visualize the data for each project. These technical tools have been used to support citizen science projects that are based on tracking how ants move through model ant colonies and imaging how urban forests grow and change over time, how turtles move through public parks and how coastlines and waterways change over time. This project created research opportunities for high-school, undergraduate and graduate students in an interdisciplinary research setting combining Computer Science, Art, Forestry and Applied Mathematics. Dozens of Citizen Science projects have been created through the rePhoto app, and thousands of pictures have been contributed to these projects. The findings of this research have been published in technical journal papers, international conferences and presented in outreach presentations. The smartphone app, rePhoto, is freely shared on iPhone and Android. Images and details of the current Citizen Science projects that it supports, and simple forms to create new projects are both available through the website: http://projectrephoto.com
