[Kyle] Hey, I'm Kyle.
I work with Schoodic Institute
as an ecologist and data analyst.
And so today I just wanted to kind of talk
about a project that we recently completed
with the Acadia National Park in particular,
along, myself with my colleagues,
Nicholas Fisichelli and Abe Miller-Rushing.
And so, yes, it's gonna be sort of an overview
of the project and what we kind of did and why we did it.
And to start, I guess we'll just introduce,
if you're not familiar with Schoodic Institute,
it's a 501c3 nonprofit organization
that's based within Acadia National Park.
You can see this.
The typical area of Acadia is on the island here,
next to Bar Harbor, right?
But it also owns property here
on this other peninsula to the east,
and that's where our campus is located, right at the tip.
And so what we do is basically
we're Acadia National Park's primary partner
in science and education, and together we manage
the largest of 18 natural National Park Service
Research Learning Centers in the US,
and our main work is supporting and conducting
scientific research that's of importance to parks
and other organizations in the area,
providing professional development for teachers,
training new generations of stewards
who will help conserve our future,
natural and cultural heritage.
And so this project's really based around forest monitoring
and sort of early detection
of different stressors for forests.
Acadia is very primarily forested, right?
And the same sort of stressors that are facing
a lot of the FEMC region
is also starting to affect Acadia National Park.
So things like climate change, human modified land use,
invasive plants, forest pests,
all these things that we heard about this morning as well,
it's all sort of causing rapidly changing forests
and contributing to different causes of forest loss.
In Acadia, forests are threatened by the recent arrival
of hemlock woolly adelgid this past winter
and impending arrival of emerald ash borer.
There's also a near complete loss of red pine from the park
due to red pine scale,
and glossy buckthorn's becoming
a really widespread invasive
that's causing issues in the park.
So, detecting these changes
is really becoming critical, right?
And the sooner we can do that,
the more likely we can implement
a cost effective management action
and limit these sort of disturbances from happening.
So, on top of that, right, monitoring that we do currently
in a lot of situations,
there's a lot of different challenges that come with these.
Obviously it's critical to what we're trying to do.
It's really an essential piece
of finding what stressors are impacting forests
and determining what locations and actions need to be taken,
focused on, in order to hopefully limit
the impact of these disturbances.
But unfortunately, it seems like a lot
of these forest disturbances go undetected
until it's kind of becoming more
established, right?
And it's because we're kind of doing these,
you know, monitoring focused on small plots
that are kind of distributed
throughout different protected areas.
It requires a lot of labor and time,
and it sometimes requires specialized skill
depending on what we're monitoring for.
So, what we kind of are proposing is this action
of including citizen science in monitoring.
So developing, what we've done is developed
a detection and early monitoring sort of program
that really incorporates this citizen science,
especially eBird and iNaturalist here.
So, when you look at these sort of programs,
you really notice that there's a ton of volunteers
just contributing without any sort of engagement
from the park necessarily.
So, for example, Acadia has over
538,000 observations of organisms
from over 4,700 iNaturalist users
and 6,600 eBird users, so that's a large number of people.
And so we really saw these opportunities that the platforms
are possibly presenting, and we wanted to try to find ways
to sort of augment the ongoing monitoring
that exists currently in the park.
And so we brought this idea
to the Acadia National Park Managers.
Sort of pretty quickly we kind of had their support
in this sort of project because they obviously felt
that the more eyes out looking
for things of importance, the better off, right,
the more likely we are to detect these species.
And so kind of the initial part of the process
was figuring out what species are we actually interested in.
Obviously the park has tons of different species
that they're focused on,
but we wanted to really try to do a comprehensive list.
And it's still kind of in the works,
but right now we have 171 species
that includes like invasive species
like glossy buckthorn I just talked about,
forest pests like hemlock woolly adelgid,
and including a bunch of rare species
that are native to the park
and maybe populations are declining, such as red pine.
We also included all of the species
that would be found in and around Acadia National Park
that are threatened and endangered,
so on the federal or state lists.
And so a brief overview of what we did is work in R.
It's what we primarily work in at Schoodic Institute, sorry,
and it was just an easy choice for us
to stay within this sort of language,
and there's a lot of tools and functions
easily accessed through that program.
And so what we did was first build functions
that allow us to access eBird and iNaturalist data
through what they call APIs.
It's basically just a way
to access it quickly through script.
And then we designed an interface
to help display these results
in a simple and easy way for park managers
to quickly understand and take note of.
And there's a program called R Markdown
that allows us to write HTML,
write R code that produces an HTML script,
so a typical webpage.
We can style it however we want
with typical CSS styling and produce these sort of nice,
easily accessible pages for managers.
We use GitHub as our project repository and version control.
So we have all our code and other important files on that.
And using GitHub allows us to access certain tools,
like GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages.
And so Pages allows us to host that webpage for free,
as well as Actions allowing us to automate
the running of these functions
and the updating of these pages
without any sort of input from me or anybody else.
It just does it automatically.
And this is sort of the final product
that we have at the moment.
So this is just an example from a few weeks ago.
And this is just, you know, title page,
and it quickly goes down into a map of observations.
So park managers can go through this page,
explore the different locations
and see what species we're seeing where pretty specifically
depending upon the error that's associated
with like iNaturalist observations sometimes.
But really specific points in general.
And then we broke it down into sort of four categories.
So our first is like the forest pests and invasive species.
So, and this week there was only
a colt's foot that was seen,
but what we're finding is each week,
there's upwards of 10 different observations
of some sort of invasive or pest species,
and what it has done so far
is really direct future observation efforts.
And this past summer we started integrating that.
We've had Earthwatch groups going out to certain areas
and we're targeted efforts looking at
or looking for invasive species,
and I think that's gonna become more and more common.
The park's really interested in this,
and it'll help inform the park's invasive teams well
on specific locations of species.
Threatened and endangered species.
Right now there's no, on this example,
there's no federal species,
but three different observations of state threatened species
as well as Acadia's home to a pretty good population
of state-endangered peregrine falcon.
Rare native species, there weren't a ton this past week,
or in this specific example,
but to date, over 67% of the species known to be in the park
have been documented by citizen scientists
on eBird and iNaturalist only.
And we also did sort of a pilot program
kind of determining if species had been recorded in the park
and seeing if any new observations are appearing.
So this one, we used a bunch of different sources.
Of course, all the iNaturalist and eBird records
through all time, as well as iDigBio
and scanned digitization records,
and then working with the park managers
for different datasets,
like bumblebee bioblitzes that they've done in the past.
And so since this program went live roughly in April
of this past year of 2023 this year,
we haven't seen any new species
that haven't been incorporated on this list that we created.
And the other aspect of this is that park managers
really wanted a way to be consistent
and clear with the communication
of this program and then these products,
so we were able to work with that GitHub Actions again
to, and this other package in R called Blastula,
which allows us to automate email alerts basically.
And so we kind of agreed on a timeline.
In this case they wanted it once a week
so every Monday when they come in it's right in their inbox.
They can click on this. This is what they see.
They can click on the the button to go to the report,
and then they'll be able to explore what we just saw.
And what we did was really develop this all
with adaptability in mind.
It's really, kind of working with these programs
the way we did with GitHub and R,
it allows us to make changes really easily.
So since it's all in script form and it's there,
it's easy to just change a little something
and then rerun it.
So, you know, it's easy to make new data visualizations,
add new species to the list,
modify the geographic range that we're looking at,
or change the schedule of the email alerts, right?
And it was also built with transferability
in terms of the geographic location.
So it's not necessarily specific to parks.
It's really easy to move it to any sort of protected area
as long as there's a shapefile.
That's all it really requires.
So yeah, basically working with citizen scientists
in this capacity, we feel that we can,
it's a potential to augment current monitoring
while keeping costs low,
engage the community in this sort of critical science,
and detect species at a scaling rate
that's maybe not feasible with just our current monitoring.
There's a lot of different benefits that I feel
to incorporating citizen science like these projects,
and one of my favorites is sort of the engagement
of people in meaningful science
and connection with nature, right?
And we heard about this in the talks earlier.
So the one thing that, though,
is that we require active communication
that's kind of between whoever's running these projects
and the people that are volunteering for them, right?
If we can successfully communicate
how important the people's time is
and showing them that we're using products
that they're contributing to
for actual science and management,
then it sort of creates this positive feedback.
Every aspect of this project as well is easily modified
to suit the needs of park managers or any manager
of any protected area,
and it's really easy to use this sort of program anywhere
that there's any sort of citizen science data.
So we can expand it.
to other sort of citizen science databases,
and as long as there's people there,
that's something that we can definitely add.
And with that, I'd just like to say thank you
to the many people who assisted us throughout this project,
and to the National Park Foundation
for making this project possible
in part through their Capacity Building Grant.
(audience applauds)
[Host] We have time for questions.
I just wanna say that anybody online
can put their question in the chat,
and Duncan will read it off when we have a break,
and the person, the people in the room questions.
[Kyle] Yes, in the orange.
[Participant] That was slick, so thank you.
And I'm curious about that feedback part.
It's cool that the managers are getting a report,
but are you able to communicate
with the iNaturalist people or the eBird people
and say, "Hey, we used your data, and this is how?"
[Kyle] Yeah, so that's something that we're working on,
and this was sort of, the grant covered this
and sort of an initial product that we created
that I haven't talked about,
but it's something that we need to do more of, of course.
The other aspect of this grant project
was a display that we put in the Welcome Center.
It's very similar.
It sort of pulls iNaturalist data.
If you think of like when you go into say like a refuge
and you see like the list of recent sightings,
and people have written down stuff, it's sort of like that,
but tailored to a little bit more
of a fancy like webpage version.
So people come, whoever visits the Welcome Center in Acadia,
specifically right now it's only
on the Schoodic site where we are,
but whoever comes into our Welcome Center
can scroll down and see and explore
on this touch screen display.
So that's one way that we're trying to do it,
but we need to work more on, for sure, yeah.
We'll go with the black first.
[Attendee] So many questions.
How do you get your volunteers,
and how do you handle sensitive information?
Like say you have rare plant
and you don't want people to know the location information?
Like, do you have geographic location information
or is it blurred out,
or you know, generalized on iNaturalist?
[Kyle] No, great questions.
iNaturalist and eBird have filters in place already
for that sort of stuff.
If park managers specifically
were, you know, were,
I mean, they would have to...
No matter what, right, if iNaturalist isn't already
sort of like filtering for those,
then it's gonna be accessible publicly.
So right now, it's kind of relying upon iNaturalist
to choose those, and they do have
a lot of those sort of filters in place.
Same with eBird.
And then, I'm forgetting the other part.
[Attendee] How do you get your volunteers, authors?
[Kyle] So right now, right, we're really not
advertising.
It's just sort of the draw of the park.
In this case, I think that's really bringing in
a lot of people, so it's just completely
kind of passive monitoring that's happening.
However, of course, active management
or active engagement of people would then tailor
towards maybe a more specific product
that could be even more effective.
So it's something that the park
is looking into more and more,
and it's something that we at Schoodic Institute
have progressed this past summer,
with our example of using Earthwatch volunteers to do that
in a few spots in the park.
[Attendee] Does the Visitor Center, though,
say, like, "If you collect iNaturalist data,
"it will be seen on this monitor?"
Like, so are people seeing that information
as they're going into the park?
[Kyle] Only if they visit our center at this point,
but we do want to expand it further on.
We'll go with Georgia.
[Georgia] I'm wondering about the quality control
around certain species.
Like some of the, you know, iNaturalist obviously
has the research grade.
That's one piece, but then,
you know, are there certain species
that it's really hard to tell from a picture
or that you really wanna make sure you're checking first
before you're moving it to the,
"Yes, this is an invasive beetle or whatever?"
Or is there any in between?
[Kyle] Basically what happens right now
is this list that you saw, whenever they filter for
and, or presented it for the managers to see,
it's a list of everything, just so we can capture
any possibility of species,
but they do double check themselves
before ever like taking any action.
Yeah, that's just an Understanding that it came to, yeah.
[Guest] These functions and scripts
that you've built in R,
are these available publicly to share?
[Kyle] They are, yeah.
They're accessible on GitHub, yeah.
[Guest] Do you have, nice.
Could you share a link for, like, the Github?
[Kyle] I think we could.
I have to clear that unfortunately with the (indistinct).
(audience laughs)
Yes.
[Partaker] Have you thought about incorporating
other similar databases like iMapInvasives
that target specifically invasive species or?
[Kyle] Yeah, it's something that we've considered
but haven't done yet.
So, obviously the grant is now over at this point,
so its current funding to keep progressing it is out,
but we're definitely interested
in pursuing more opportunities
to start doing something like that, so yeah.
Yeah.
[Viewer] I was curious,
did any of your app partners have either the ability
or the willingness to identify
local projects like these
so that you could work with them.
Did someone, I mean, in Acadia you could have obviously
your own advertisements about it,
but you come to an area that's been flagged
for this type of opportunity.
If you have your app, it lets you know
that something is not going in that area, what it is.
Like, is that something that they have any ability to do?
[Kyle] I don't know
if I'm fully understanding the question.
[Viewer] So, you're geotagged obviously
for your own observations
when you're using any of those apps.
This is something that would identify,
you've identified a shapefile for Acadia, for example.
Anything, any observations coming from that area
could then, for example,
"Hey that was something it did flag.
"Hey, this is a project ongoing in Acadia National Park.
"These are the sorts of things they're looking for,"
to make it less passive.
[Kyle] Right.
No, I mean, we haven't done that,
but I do think that's a good opportunity.
I don't know what sort of tools exist
within iNaturalist for that.
Like with, I don't know if you can send out
messages like that to the projects or not, but,
I'm getting a maybe, a yes back there. (laughs)
-Yeah. -So yeah,
maybe that's a good opportunity to pursue in the future.
[Host] I think we do have one online question.
[Duncan] We did.
This is from Sylvia Chin.
"This is really exciting.
"Can you use these data in a quantitative way
"or is it mostly presence or absence?"
[Kyle] In, I mean, at large, definitely.
In this sort of situation,
it is mainly just presence/absence,
but that's what the park was most interested at this time.
But I mean, yes, like, we have the quality grades
that exist within iNaturalist and eBird, right?
You know, there's complete checklists in eBird
that enable us to sort of do like occupancy analysis
and things like that, where you can actually assume
non-detection based on the lack of presence.
If someone was fully,
and you check the box saying you are actually out there
for this amount of time, this distance,
and this is exactly what you did see,
like, so that's one aspect.
And then there's of course
the iNaturalist research grade quality stuff too.
So,
within reason, there is certainly
a lot of opportunity for more quantitative
and like professional science
with these sorts of science data.
[Host] Great. We're just right on time so that,
oh, you have, sorry, you have one more question?
-Sorry. -Yeah, we have time
-for one more. -Just building off
of some of the ideas from earlier,
you know, Acadia gets a ton of visitation
in a relatively small area, land base.
I'm curious on like what challenges you see
for translating this to a different area of property
that doesn't get that visitation
or is more spread out
and maybe, you know, like what threshold you see
to this working there, or how you would combat that?
[Kyle] No, it's a great question,
and something that we've also pursued in the project
is we created the same sort of products
for Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument
up near Baxter State Park in Maine.
Much newer, a lot big, well, not a lot bigger
in terms of area, and a lot less visitation, right?
The products still work, but maybe to a lesser degree.
And the one thing there is I think in these areas
that maybe don't have quite the same amount of engagement,
the one thing that we do see is
the number of engagement, I mean, right?
We do see consistent,
more consistent engagement with the same volunteers.
So, if we can build sort of like a good team
that's really consistent and really reliable,
that might be sort of more of the way
that you have to do it.
And that might require a little bit more of an investment
from like the main interest in that area, but.