We need citizen scientists to help us better understand the ecology of the salt marsh. We have two web sites where you or your students can help us with our research.
The first web site is the "Image Matching Game" at http://129.7.249.177:85/index/signin or ScalingUpMarshScience.cs.uh.edu. Since 2010, we have taken thousands of overlapping photographs of a salt marsh, and we need to align the photographs to create detailed maps for each year (each year consists of about 10,000 photographs). Because the images are taken from close to the marsh surface, and lack strong visual features, software programs are unable to align them automatically. Humans are better at this task than computers, and can identify matching features in pairs of photographs. The second web site is the "Marsh Explorer" at http://marshexplorer.cs.uh.edu:86/. This site asks you to identify the plant and animal species present in the photographs. This is a harder task, but it gets us the detailed information that we need to understand the distribution of each species. It is also more educational, because users will learn the names of the common marsh species. Both web sites teach some basic facts about salt marsh ecology. (If you have ideas about facts that are missing, please send us suggestions using the feedback link). We'd love your help at both sites, and your feedback. Educators, please consider this as an extra credit assignment in your classes. It will expose your students to the idea of citizen science, and also teach them a little bit about salt marsh ecology. Steven Pennings, University of Houston, spenni...@uh.edu
