Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists

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Continuing as GreenPolicy360 "Planet Citizens, Planet Scientist", we look at 'ocean forests' with perspective and need for interactive assistance'

Help with the Kelp, Join in -- Work as a Planet Citizen, Planet Scientist to keep the Ocean healthy -- http://www.floatingforests.org/

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Take a look at the newly launched Floating Forest Project -- and request for help from planet citizens who are willing to volunteer as planet scientists.

Here's the invitation from the Floating Forest website:

Citizen scientists are recruited via the Internet and are given instructions in how to hunt for giant kelp via satellite imagery.

They (you) are then given Landsat images and asked to outline any giant kelp patches that they find.

Findings are crosschecked with those from other citizen scientists and then passed to the Floating Forest science team for verification.

The size and location of these forests are catalogued and used to study global kelp trends.

As of January 11, 2015, more than 3,400 citizen scientists had joined up to look for kelp in 328,000 Landsat images...

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GreenPolicy believes this is a planetary moment to jump, do it, sign up, help out!

Put a toe in first, test the waters (the water's fine) -- it could be time to become a "planet citizen, planet scientist"

Floating Forests - Earth Observatory/NASA-Landsat

Origin of Floating Forests Project

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Landsat 8 detects near-infrared wavelengths of light to spot & monitor offshore kelp forests (NASA Earth Observatory image)

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"Kelp are the redwoods of the sea..." The world’s largest marine plants, they regularly grow up to 35 meters (115 feet) tall.

Floating Forests

Help with the Kelp, Join in -- be a Be a Planet Citizen, Planet Scientist -- http://www.floatingforests.org/

Floating Forests - Earth Observatory/NASA-Landsat

Origin of Floating Forests Project

Planet Citizen, Planet Scientist

Kyle Cavanaugh had an idea. “These forests change so rapidly and on a variety of different time scales—months to years to decades—so we needed a long record with consistent, repeated observations,” Cavanaugh said. He devised a method to use Landsat satellite data to monitor kelp forests.

A few things made Landsat an obvious resource. Since the 1970s, the satellites have had a regular collection schedule (twice monthly). Their data and images are managed by the U.S. Geological Survey and are reliably stored in an archive that dates back more than forty years. And Landsat’s images are calibrated, or standardized, across different generations of satellites, making it possible to compare data collected across several decades...

Landsat measures the energy reflected and emitted from Earth at many different wavelengths. By knowing how features on Earth reflect or absorb energy at certain wavelengths, scientists can map and measure changes to the surface. The most important feature for the kelp researchers is Landsat’s near-infrared band, which measures wavelengths of light that are just outside our visual range. Healthy vegetation strongly reflects near-infrared energy, so this band is often used in plant studies. Also, water absorbs a lot of near-infrared energy and reflects little, making the band particularly good for mapping boundaries between land and water.

“The near-infrared is key for identifying kelp from surrounding water,” Cavanaugh explained. “Like other types of photosynthesizing vegetation, giant kelp have high reflectance in the near infrared. This makes the kelp canopy really stand out from the surrounding water.”

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After a recent meeting on kelp forests and climate change, researchers Byrnes, Cavanaugh, and other colleagues set out to consolidate all of the available kelp forest data from around the world. They wanted to take a step toward understanding how climate change is affecting kelp globally, but they quickly discovered they had a sparse patchwork of information.

Byrnes was struck with a thought. They had used Landsat to expand their studies across time, so why not use Landsat to expand their studies around the world? Could Landsat be used to establish global trends in kelp forest extent? The answer was yes, but the problem was eyeballs.

Unlike research on terrestrial vegetation—which uses Landsat data and powerful computer processing arrays to make worldwide calculations—distinguishing kelp forests requires manual interpretation. While kelp forests pop out to the human eye in near-infrared imagery, computers looking at the data numerically can confuse kelp patches with land vegetation. Programs and coded logic that separate aquatic vegetation from land vegetation can be confounded by things like clouds, sunglint, and sea foam...

"Automated classification methods just don’t produce acceptable levels of accuracy..."

Byrnes and Cavanaugh put together a science team and joined with Zooniverse, a group that connects professional scientists with citizen scientists in order to help analyze large amounts of data. The result was the Floating Forests project.

https://www.zooniverse.org/#climate

https://www.zooniverse.org/#nature

The Floating Forest concept is all about getting more eyeballs on Landsat imagery. Citizen scientists—recruited via the Internet—are instructed in how to hunt for giant kelp in satellite imagery. They are then given Landsat images and asked to outline any giant kelp patches that they find. Their findings are crosschecked with those from other citizen scientists and then passed to the science team for verification. The size and location of these forests are catalogued and used to study global kelp trends.

Join in!

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