Apps for Oak Trees: Can social media help save a forest?

From the East Bay Express: a nice article by Caitlin Esch about mobile apps, citizen science and environmental science. The article features the OakMapper, and ken-ichi ueda's iNaturalist, and UC Davis' Roadkill Observation System. The article includes a nice history of the OakMapper, including our early days wrangling faxes and hand-drawn maps, and the early inspiration for the site: the USGS Earthquake Mapper.

OakMapper at the Cal Academy of Sciences

The California Academy of Sciences has just published a video about the oakmapper website and iphone app! The video features Maggi Kelly and Shufei Lei, and will be running on the floor of the Cal Academy, and on their website. Check it out!

Oakmapper featured in ANR's green blog

Our own oakmapper features in the recent ANR Green blog. Pam Kan Rice is the author of Want to report SOD? We’ve got an app for that!

UC Berkeley and the NBC Bay Area website has picked up the story. Thanks Pam!

Check it out! and Happy New Year. 2011 is going to be a good one.

OakMapper in the news!

OakMapper is featured in a new ANR news report from Pam Kan Rice. Check it out here. From the article:

Smartphone users can report sudden oak death

California’s majestic oak trees have been felled by the hundreds of thousands by a disease first reported in 1995 and dubbed “sudden oak death.”  To get a broader perspective on the disease, UC Berkeley scientists have developed a smartphone app for hikers and other nature lovers to report trees they find that have succumbed to sudden oak death.

While out in a park or forest, iPhone users can use the new OakMapper mobile application to report sightings of trees killed by Phytophthora ramorum, the plant pathogen that causes sudden oak death. Onsite, they can note the symptoms they see, such as seeping, bark discoloration, crown discoloration, dead leaves, shoot die-back, fungus, beetle frass and beetle bore holes. The OakMapper app, created by scientists in the UC Berkeley Geospatial Innovation Facility, uses the phone's built-in GPS to identify the participant’s location when the data is submitted.

Some favorite ecology-related mashups

From Ken-ichi Ueda and friends: iNaturalist.org.

• Where you can record what you see in nature, meet other nature lovers, and learn about the natural world. Colorful, well-designed and useful, this site is a must for all you explorers of the natural world, or those of you who just ponder the wildlife in your backyard.

From GreenInfo Network and CalLands:

• The new California Protected Areas Database (CPAD 1.3) has just been released in geodatabase and shape file formats, and is available through google maps overlay here.

From UC Davis' Road Ecology Center and the Information Center for the Environment: California Roadkill Observation System.

• You can report roadkills you observe anywhere in the state, helping all of us to understand the causes of roadkill and how we can reduce the conflict between animals and vehicles. Roadkill is a major cause of mortality for many animals in California, but designing appropriate management responses takes political support, money, and knowledge of where and how to act. Roadkill data are an important part of that equation and we invite you, our expert colleagues, to join us in collecting these data on a public site.

From my lab: the OakMapper.

• OakMapper is designed to let users explore the locations of confirmed P. ramorum sites, and contribute to our database by reporting trees that might have the disease. And it is now mobile! Speaking of mobile:

From Imperial College London: EpiCollect.

• A mobile phone application will help professional and "citizen" scientists collect and analyse data from "in the field", anywhere in the world. The EpiCollect software collates data from certain mobiles - on topics such as disease spread or the occurrence of rare species - in a web-based database. Uses Android. The BBC article.

OakMapper has gone mobile!

Not be mistaken with OatsMapper.com (mapping Hall and Oats reunion concerts), the OakMapper has gone mobile!

If you have an iPhone with OS 3.0, you can now download and install the mobile version of OakMapper on iTune's App Store for free. The mobile version of OakMapper allows you to do the same thing as the web version: view submitted Sudden Oak Death cases and report a SOD occurrence. However, the OakMapper makes those two actions much easier by taking advantage of the GPS unit onboard the iPhone. The GPS coordinates provided by the iPhone will allow you to quickly report an SOD case and will allow you to find out all the submitted SODs within a 20 miles radius around you. We hope that the ease of reporting SOD cases using the OakMapper iPhone application will encourage more submissions from the general public who own an iPhone. 

GPS vs. GPS

There has been some buzz on the blogs about the possibility of smart phones replacing more standard recreational grade GPS devices. This article in the NY Times suggests that the smartphone is beginning to displace the GPS receiver as a convenient way for drivers to get directions to unknown destinations.

Next might be the use of smart phones for non-driving uses of the recreational GPS devices, like geocaching, or science education.  We will be releasing our OakMapper device for the iPhone in September, and will likely be better able to comment on the comparison.

Indigenous mapping network at UC Berkeley

Our friends from DataBasin are on campus on Monday. Kai Henifin is a Cultural Ecologist/GIS Analyst with the non-profit organization Conservation Biology Institute, the developers of DataBasin. Kai will be speaking about "Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge to Improve Conservation through Data Sharing" as part of the Berkeley Indigenous Mapping Network. For more info on the event.

We have some interesting cross-overs with CBI and DataBasin: we added our SOD data to DataBasin recently (see image at left); and CBI have a nice modeling project looking at fisher in the southern Sierra that Reg and Rick are using in their SNAMP work.

iPhone apps for environmental science

Having just set up a HOBO weather station over the weekend (ain't she pretty?), and being dismayed at having to use my windows computer to control it, I wondered about other ways to monitor the environment.  Amazingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, there are many new iPhone apps out there for us to investigate. 

For example: the recent NPR study about soil moisture monitoring via the iPhone is interesting. The sensors themselves are very expensive, but are monitored via an iPhone app.

Also: this new Wind Meter app, which I am going to test at lunch today. Seems fun, but a far cry from a real anemometer.

And of course: we will soon be releasing our OakMapper iPhone app.

Sudden Oak Death Science Symposium Highlights

I thought I'd post some highlights from the SOD Science Symposium, currently running in Scotts Valley, CA.

Dave Rizzo presented new disease information since the first isolations (9 years ago this week!) in 2000 to today. Some highlights include:

• Across California, there has been filling in of existing areas of the disease, but new areas of confirmation of note:
  
  • furthest north in CA is 45 miles north of Redway, CA; confirmed from stream baiting, and is associated with a nursery. No terrestrial confirmations. In Mendocino, another river baiting example north of Fort Bragg; no terrestrial confirmations.
• There are some exciting management projects ongoing, from preventative treatment to large-scale management.

Alan Kanaskie talked about the Oregon situation. Highlights include:

• Tanoak is critical for SOD in Oregon;
• Monitoring in OR depends on aerial surveys, field surveys and stream baiting. With these methods, they are confident that ramorum only exists in the known quarantine area. However, they are getting rare PCR confirmations out of steam baiting in new watersheds, but they have not been able to replicate with culture, nor have they found any newly infected trees in those watersheds.
• They are confident their management approach is working to slow the spread, and compares a map of Humboldt and Curry counties; in Humboldt, things look worse than in Curry.

Sandra Denman from Forest Research in UK gave an update on Pr in Europe: still mainly a nursery problem, but some interesting facts include:

• Coutries reporting Pr in Europe in 2000 were few, and only 4 countries had outdoor outbreaks; in 2008: 19 countries report Pr in nurseries, and "burgeoning" reports of outdoor outbreaks across western and southern europe.
• In the UK, Pr has been found in 600 nurseries in UK. In outdoor outbreaks, rhodies are the main problem, and outside outbreaks on trees are associated with these ornamentals.
• First use of "kerfuffel" in a science presentation that I have heard.
• P. kernoviae is also important in UK; and last year Pk was found in the Republic of Ireland for the first time.

Clive Brasier, from UK Forestry Commission, talked about P species and increased invasions due to international trade, and weak international biosecurity. Before 2000, about 20% of P sp were threats to forests; since 2000 (with 50+ new P species named), about 60% are threats to trees and forests. He guesses there might be 100-500 unnamed P. species out there that could be invasive in forests. They are now hypothesizing that Pr came from Japan and/or Taiwan.

For more on Sudden Oak Death, check out the OakMapper site, and other oakmapper posts on this blog.