iPhone apps for citizen science
06.20.09
If you're already carrying an iPhone on your hikes, you've got instant access to endless knowledge about the natural world in your pocket. Impressive! But with these applications, current and forthcoming, you can also be an active contributor to science:
- iBird Explorer: Leave that stack of heavy guidebooks at home, and take the entire avian directory of North America out in the field. You can even play song samples. Great for Audubon's Christmas Bird Count (unless it's rainy or muddy...) or use at home for Project Feederwatch. iBird can't identify birds by song the way Shazam identifies music without a sound-isolating microphone. We could see this feature soon, though, thanks to...
- Pasco's SPARK, demoed at Apple's 2009 developers conference, will turn the iPhone/iPod Touch into a basic portable labratory by connecting to a variety of sensors. Possible applications include water and air quality analysis.
- Photo-based species identification -- Not available yet, but exciting! CNN reports that "researchers at several universities are working on iPhone applications and computer programs that could analyze digital photos of plant leaves and automatically identify the plant's species." This would allow non-expert botanists to help out in a Bioblitz, for example, automatically identifying (and maybe GPS tagging) each species.
- GPS, built into the iPhone 3G via Google Maps, allows the user to more-or-less accuately record and upload their location. Combined with other science applications, the possibilities are amazing. Users could collaboratively create real-time maps of everything from species range to water chemistry. As a bonus, the 3GS (2009 iPhone) includes a compass. Kind of takes the hard work out of orienteering, doesn't it?
Granted, the iPhone is an expensive, delicate device ill-suited to outdoor classrooms. But if you're carrying one around anyway, why not put it to work improving the world's knowledgebase?
