Traveling to Anchorage, a flight that can take 7 or 8
hours provides plenty of time to catch up on reading, listening to podcasts,
and browsing through recent scientific journals. Today was no exception; I was
reading through the August 1, 2014 issue of Science magazine and came across an
interesting article on page 494. It was entitled "Fake flowers fool Arctic
insects" and provided a brief summary of how a combination of sticky
plastic flowers and exclusion screens were being used to study pollination of Dryas
across the Arctic.
Pollination and its sensitivity to insects, wind, and
weather, is an important topic in ecology and is often studied in many
ecosystems around the world. So what caught my interest in this particular
study? Rather than send out scientists to establish experiments across the
Arctic, ecologists at the University of Helsinki used volunteers, including
citizen scientists, to establish the required experiments from Alaska to
Finland. Twenty teams participated in the study using materials provided
through the Global Dryas Project (http://www.helsinki.fi/foodwebs/dryas/index.htm).
There are two aspects of this project that I saw as
particularly interesting. The first was the extensive spatial deployment of the
experiment; 20 sites or more throughout the Arctic. Collaboration and
coordination among groups allowed this to happen. The second was the aspect of
crowd-sourcing science. This is probably not exactly the appropriate
terminology to use in describing this research, and thus my apologies if I
misrepresent this experiment. However, one can envision dozens of groups coming
together in an organic, bottom-up fashion to achieve the scientific goals of
such a project. I find this especially attractive and one that could possibly
be used to gain insights into the breadth of changes taking place across the
Arctic.
Could crowd-sourcing be used to gather spatially-explicit
information on thermokarst formation, permafrost temperatures, thaw depth, or
shrub expansion in Alaska and beyond? What would this web-based interface look
like and could it generate the volume of data necessary to derive useful and
scientifically-defensible conclusions? I'd like to think it could...
Oh, and did I say long flights to Alaska also allowed
plenty of time to think?
