A ground beetle from Tierra del Fuego collected by Charles Darwin; six Asian fairy-bluebirds gathered by British Raj officer Allan Octavian Hume; and the tiny blossoms of poisonous white snakeroot, one of nearly 800,000 plants preserved by Louisiana botany professor R. Dale Thomas—these are among the biological specimens housed in museums around the world. “They’re a treasure trove,” says Robert Guralnick, associate curator of biodiversity informatics at the University of Florida. “But they’re locked away and difficult to access unless you have an in.” Guralnick and other experts are part of the massive ongoing effort to digitize the records of natural history collections (see, e.g., doi:10.1093/biosci/ biv005 and doi:10.1093/biosci/bit006). With an estimated two billion museum specimens around the world, the task is daunting and expensive. That is where Notes from Nature (NfN), an online citizen science project, comes in. Anyone with Internet access can log in and transcribe records from natural history samples found at more than 200 institutions. “Realizing that we could use citizen scientists to help with this huge backlog was an ‘a-ha’ moment,” Gurlanick says. “We knew there were people out there who would think these objects were cool and would be up for the challenge.” So far, more than 7000 people have transcribed some one million specimens since the project went live in April 2013. NfN was the brainchild of three consortia: the Natural History Museum of London, which wants to digitize ornithology ledgers; the Calbug project, which is focusing on pinned insect collections from nine California institutions; and the Southeastern Regional Network of Expertise and Collections (SERNEC) project, which hopes to digitize plant specimens from 222 herbaria. In 2012, each submitted a proposal to the Citizen Science Alliance, a collaboration of scientists, software developers, and educators who are behind Zooniverse, a leading Web site for citizen science projects. “[The CSA] came to us and said, ‘Hey we got a handful of these proposals for museum specimens. How about you guys work together?’” says Michael Denslow, project manager with SERNEC and chair of the NfN steering committee. Over the next year, Denslow, Guralnick, and other NfN steering committee members developed the user interface (with help from Zooniverse and Vizzuality). Volunteers can transcribe specimens from four categories: plants, macrofungi, insects, and birds. They view scanned photos of actual specimens with identification tags attached or ledger pages with detailed data about particular specimens and type in basic information, such as species name and where and when the specimen was found. “It’s not always easy,” says Guralnick. “Sometimes, you’re dealing with crazy eighteenth-century flourishy handwriting where you’re trying to figure out, is that an R or an N?” To ensure accuracy, he says, each item is transcribed four times, usually by four different volunteers. Volunteers come from all over the world, although most of the regulars hail from the United States and Great Britain. To keep interest in the project strong, steering committee members contribute to a blog aimed at informing volunteers. The posts range from announcing National Moth Week to sharing an infographic showing the time difference between plant and insect transcription (the former takes, on average, 61 seconds longer) and including short profiles on volunteers such as Britain’s Jonathan Moore, who says, “I love reading the careful notes and imagining the collector in the middle of nowhere, in the sun or rain, finding their plant and taking their samples and data.” A number of the volunteers are scientists, which does not surprise Guralnick, who himself does some of the transcription. “I care about the data,” he says. “It enhances the work I do professionally as a researcher.” Guralnick strongly believes that digitizing the records will help with biodiversity research by, among other things, creating better models of species distribution, which, he says, is urgently needed in the face of climate change and increasing species extinction. Denslow says that they plan to scale up the project to include a greater number of specimen types and also to include those that must be transcribed in languages other than English. He says that one satisfying thing about the project is that it appears to be creating greater interest in the museum objects. “We’re finding that as museums put more data out there online, they are getting more requests to see and use the actual specimen itself,” he says. “At the end of the day, this is about an actual physical flower sitting on a shelf. You just scratch the surface by looking at it online. Then you need to come to the museum and measure it, analyze its DNA, and all those other things.”
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Nov 3, 2015
Junggon Kim + 1
Open Access
