Saturday, September 26, 2009
SAEON?
I recently read an article in our local weekend news paper (Weekend Argus, 26/09/09, p13) on the South African Environmental Observation Network or SAEON. Two BIG takeaways:1. SAEON recently established a citzen science initiative where the layman will have an opportunity to report on anectdotal evidence of climate change. No details were given on how this intitiave would be co-ordinated. Also no mention was made of whether the Internet would be used. I think there's a great opportunity to use existing social media platforms such as Twitter and Flickr to record the obversations. Twitter has a publically available web API through which climate change twitter updates can be extracted for further analysis.
2. SAEON previously launched their "Birds Eye View" initiative through which the laymen can provide updates on bird sightings, e.g. looking out for the first arrivals of easily identified migratory birds species in our geographuical areas. The following is an extract from the newspaper article as mentioned above:
"Once we've pooled all this information from all over the country into a database, it will be really valuable. We can start building a puzzle of how plants and animals are responding in different areas over time to climate change. Already, across the northern hemisphere, deciduous trees are getting leaves, flowers are blooming and migratory birds are arriving anywhere from one to two weeks earlier than they did 30 years ago. In essence, spring has sprung - but it's all happening too soon ... As the timing of important events shift, we anticipate problems for the completion of life cycles in certain organisms."
Not sure about you but this sounds like the kind of thing that Twitter was born to do. I will keep you posted.
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