Angle Brackets and time-lapse enviro monitoring w/Nerds4Nature @ EcoHackSF

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1. ...to collaboratively build awesome tools that help us understand, protect, and revive the natural world. Bringing together technologists and environmental professionals, students and citizen scientists...
2. Mapping biodiversity in local parks with grassroots bioblitzes We take an average of a thousand geotagged iNat observations and confirm at least a couple hundred species at each event
3. We organize special field events like the… ! NatureNerdFests @ Mare Island USGS Western Ecological Research Center
4. Other N4N Projects Air Quality Sensors & Calibration DNA Barcoding
5. Project Night in SF or Oakland every month ! ~~~ ! Find us on Meetup and Google Groups! ! ~~~ ! www.nerdsfornature.org
6. Change Brackets: Crowdsourced time-lapse images for eco-research Programmer -- Ken-ichi Ueda, kueda@gmail.com Designers -- Dan Rademacher & Beth Schecter Nerd Organizer / EcoHack Lead -- Ken McGary, kensanfran@gmail.com
7. A simple, elegant concept developed by Sam Droege, USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. monitorchange.org Nature Nerds added design and social media elements, and we’re now turning park visitors into a remote sensor network! inspired by...
8. Mt. Diablo Morgan Fire For our first effort, we're documenting habitat change in the aftermath of the Morgan Fire on Mount Diablo, which burned 3,100 acres in September 2013. ! We're collaborating with Mount Diablo State Park and the Wildlife Society, Western Section.
9. How It Works
10. Installation Four sign/bracket locations on hiking trail overlooks provide both close-up and distant views of the burn area.
11. February 15
12. May 3, 2014
13. Why improve & automate? Requests to help monitor other eco-systems • Aftermath of the Yosemite Rim Fire (second largest in CA history) • Aftermath of South Bay proscribed fires • We expect many similar inquiries in the future ! Other applications we envision • Public events like Maker Faire (where we will have Change Bracket signs) • Construction and pollution sites • Gardens, greenhouses, and farms
14. What can we build on? 1. Ken-ichi's js code and relevant html is in the public Github repo here: ! https://github.com/nerdsfornature/nerdsfornature.github.com/tree/master/ monitor-change ! ! 2. The script that Ken-ichi has been using to write a nightly file of recent tag usage: ! https://gist.github.com/kueda/937d12c280dc5ae8d1af
15. Slideshow Upgrades ! • Update the existing website and sync script to read and write data to a Google Spreadsheet, with column to allow manual exclusion of bogus (hi mom!) images from the project. ! • Make a totally free, bugless, self-sustaining web app on Google App Engine that lets people enter a set of tags and then it will regularly archive image URLs to a spreadsheet, along with a page equivalent to our existing site to show a slideshow. We doubt such an app would ever be popular enough to surpass Google's free quota, and if it does, business plan!
16. True Timelapse Upgrades • Document a manual method or develop an automated way to generate time-lapse movies using photostitching software like Hugin. ! • Make a timelapse programmatically with Python Imaging Library (PIL or Pillow) or whatever image processing lib you like. ! • Make a timelapse programmatically as above and make it automatically choose control points, adjust for exposure, and account for elapsed time variations. ! • Use openCV to find control points?
17. Project Wizard Upgrade For bonus points! Develop a way to make this an easily replicable sort of campaign by filling out forms or something to generate sign images and twitter scripts and set up a web server and blog/slideshow/movie and so on. ! Currently the sign image is an Adobe Illustrator file/template.
19. www.nerdsfornature.org/monitor-change/ ! @nerds4nature
20. @KenMcGary kensanfran@gmail.com