Alun SaltThe Zooniverse has two citizen science projects in need of help, and they’re both botanical.
The Orchid Observers are i the final stages of their project. They have been analysing photos of orchids taken in the UK to examine climate change. Now they need your help to finish off the transcriptions of the specimen labels from the Natural History Museum collection for comparison. They’ve been welcoming people into the Natural History Museum to work alongside them as part of their project.
The other project is more exotic. The Jungle Rhythms project aims to transcribe hand-drawn observations of the life cycle events of more than 2,000 trees (of more than 500 different species!) between 1937 and 1958 in the tropical rainforest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. You can read more about this project at Koen Hufkens’s blog.
In both cases the projects aren’t simply generating new data, but also using data we should already be able to use but, for whatever reason (usually digitisation) can’t. In the case of Jungle Rhythms, it’s pencil notes with shades of grey in the files that’s causing headaches.
Finally, if you want to ogle photos of coastline, Floating Forests is still open, which we blogged about last summer.
