Citizen Science Projects

with Alex Cowan from The Polar Citizen Science Collective

The Polar Collective pairs up cruise passengers to the Arctic and Antarctica with the polar science community by engaging travellers in data collection projects and Noble Caledonia is proud to have been involved with Citizen Science at Sea projects for several years. In this short talk Pam Le Noury talks to Alex Cowan about the various projects that are available to get involved with, be it counting penguins, helping to identify whales or observing ice formations which can be done from home for general interest or in preparation for your polar cruise.

Below are details of the Polar Citizen Science Collective Projects that Pam and Alex discuss in the above video for you to try at home:

Happywhale

www.happywhale.com

Initially all you need is to take photos, with your camera’s internal clock set to local time

Ice Watch

You can prepare for a polar trip by downloading the Polar Collective app (you will need to register for an account on Happywhale.com) and learning how to make sea ice observations here

You can also use the app to collect marine mammal sightings, though for the moment this data, while looked at and stored, are not actively used other than to double-check the time and location of Happywhale sightings.

NASA GLOBE Atmospheric Observations

If you want to actively engage in a project at home download the NASA GLOBE app onto your smartphone. Training materials are available here.

For more advanced data collection, including assessments that will open up the app to allow you enter more data: globe.gov/get-trained

If you are looking to branch out and do more polar-related work at home, or you don’t have a smartphone, then have a look at Penguin Watch, where you can do some of the image analysis on photos collected by automated cameras in Antarctica: zooniverse.org/projects

Other

There are plenty of other projects across the world on the Zooniverse website if you want to branch out – there’s even a polar bear one. If you want to do something closer to home then you can learn about lots of different citizen science projects at the below links. Some you can do all the time and some are on set dates so the whole country is doing them together:

nature.scot/scotlands-biodiversity

nhm.ac.uk/take-part/citizen-science