Scientists and Applications

Joint CS4760, CS5760 & HU4628 Scientists and App Ideas

Below is the list of scientists and their potential applications for collaborative CS4760, CS5760 & HU4628 teams.

Amy Sieger – Oklahoma State Soil Health Coordinator

Contact Information

Email: Amy.Seiger at conservation.ok.gov
Phone: (405) 250-5851
https://www.ok.gov/conservation/News/Awards_&_Recognition/New_Employee_-_Amy_Seiger,_Soil_Health_Coordinator.html
Oklahoma Conservation Commission
2800 N Lincoln Blvd. Oklahoma City, OK 73105

App Idea: An informative and responsive app to use for communication, event announcement, information and data sharing

Soil Health is a conservation concept where farmers manage their land for soil quality. This concept and practices have in turn improved our environment(particularly water quality).  It is a science based practice using 5 principles to improve our soil’s organic matter. Soil health is attended by be adaptable to our environment and planting accordingly and also maintaining the 5 key principles.  Because it’s so new for many Oklahoma farmers we are trying to spread our resources digitally. We need an app to better communicate with our landowners. Many have questions and we have limited availability. If we have a resource app to improve information output, we can better serve each community in a more timely fashion.

Oklahoma has 4 major regions with unique landscapes, climates, and resources.  We need an app that can tailor toward these regions and resources. We need a list of contacts, a list of resource suppliers, and live question response area.  I want to have limited administration power. I want a limited number of people available to respond to questions. An interactive map to select a list for that region of resources would be great.

Initial Meetings

First Team-Scientist Meeting, Thursday, 1/24/2019, 4 pm CST (5 pm EST)
Second Team-Scientist Meeting, Friday, 2/1/2019, 4 pm CST (5 pm EST)
Prefer to use Zoom for meetings.

Jill Carr – Marine Fisheries Habitat Specialist

Contact Information

Email: jillian.carr at state.ma.us
Phone:  978-282-0308 x108
http://seagrasssoundings.blogspot.com/
Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, 30 Emerson Ave, Gloucester, MA 01930

App Idea: Eelgrass Monitoring App

This app will replace the paper datasheets used by marine biologists and citizen (volunteer) scientists in the collection of eelgrass data during monitoring events. Eelgrass is an important marine plant that forms large meadows, which are critical habitat for a variety of important fish and crustaceans in Massachusetts. Scientists will use this app to streamline data collection and reduce error while working at sea. The preferred platform is mobile phone, and cellular data connection will be available. Data will be used to analyze trends in eelgrass gains or losses, and inform resource management decisions.

Initial Meetings

First Team-Scientist Meeting, Friday, 1/25/2019, 3:30 pm
Second Team-Scientist Meeting, Friday, 2/1/2019, at 3:30 pm
Prefer to use Zoom for meetings.

Chris Goforth – Head, Citizen Science

Contact Information

Email: chris.goforth at naturalsciences.org
Phone:  520-444-6282
Office Phone: (919) 707-8882
https://dragonflydetectives.wordpress.com/author/christinegoforth/
https://naturalsciences.org/
Museum of Natural Sciences
1671 Gold Star Drive, Raleigh NC 27607

App Idea: Dragonfly Detectives

Dragonfly Detectives is a citizen science educational program in North Carolina that engages kids in grades 4-8 in authentic scientific experiences. Among the many fun activities the students participate in during their time in the mutli-day program, they also collect data for the Dragonfly Detectives citizen science project. The project studies the impacts of changes in weather on dragonfly flight activity and combines dragonfly counts the students make with weather data they measure with scientific equipment. The app will allow the students to easily input the data they gather into a spreadsheet/database that can be sorted and downloaded by the lead researcher on the back end. Students will need to be able to input a date, time, location, data for seven weather parameters, and the individual counts for up to 15 students for each bout of data collection. Because some of the kids who will be using the app will be fairly young, a simple interface will be essential for successful data entry.

Initial Meetings

First Team-Scientist Meeting, Thursday, 1/24/2018, 5 pm
Second Team-Scientist Meeting, Thursday, 1/31/2018, 5 pm
Prefer to meet by Zoom

Don LaFreniere – Assistant Professor of Historical Geography and GIS & Sarah Scarlett – Assistant Professor of History

Contact Information

Email: djlafren at mtu.edu & sfscarle at mtu.edu
Office Phone: 906-487-2189
http://www.keweenawhistory.com/
Office: AOB 200A, GLRC 208
Lab: GLRC 316
Social Science Department
Michigan Technological University

App Idea: Keweenaw Time Traveler Story Query Tool

The Keweenaw Time Traveler is a historic spatial data infrastructure (HSDI)that is recreating the built and social environments of the Copper Country from 1850 to 1950. Every ten years, corresponding with the decennial census, we are mapping and modelling in all of the houses, businesses, schools, and copper mining sites. Individual level socio-demographic information is mapped to each structure, allowing us to know where every individual lived, worked, and went to school in the Keweenaw for a hundred year period. Core to the project is the ‘Explore App’, which allows the public to explore the datasets and contribute their own knowledge about the region with spatial-temporally located text, photos, and videos. At present, all stories are viewable on the maps at once. Next next step is to construct a query tool that will allow users to filter the stories into themes and display them interactively on the map. This functionality will use the basemaps and data already created and will need to make calls directly into HSDI database via our API and PHP endpoints.

Initial Meetings

First Team-Scientist Meeting, Friday 1/25/2019 at 4 pm
Second Team-Scientist Meeting, Friday 2/1/2019 at 4 pm
Meet in GLRC 316

 

Kathryn Kass – Physician Assistant

Contact Information

Email: srkckass at gmail.com
Cell Phone: (906) 281-0992
Office:
Upper Great Lakes Family Health Center Houghton Clinic
600 Mac Innes Drive Houghton MI 49931

App Idea: Medical Appointment Scheduler

Medical facilities are sometimes behind the times with regarding to use of technology with limits efficiency.  Utilizing current technologies, including scheduling appointments online via a web app, will improve efficiency in a medical setting and allow for greater convenience for patients.  Improving convenience can create an overall better medical experience for patients. This app would allow university student patients to schedule appointments for acute problems such as ankle sprains, sore throats, and rashes directly through the app.  Once the appointment is confirmed, it would become active on the nurse and medical provider’s (Physician, Physician Assistant, NursePractitioner) schedule which would allow them to prepare the chart in advance of the visit time. This will allow patients to bypass the reception staff for making simple acute appointments and free-up reception staff for other phone calls or for more complicated complaints.

Initial Meetings

First Team-Scientist Meeting: Thursday, 1/24/2019, at  5 pm
Second Team-Scientist Meeting: Thursday, 1/31/2019, at 5 pm
Using cell phone, 906-281-0992, for the conference call.

Mary Ellen Miller – GIS Scientist

Contact Information

Email: memiller at mtu.edu
Office Phone: (734) 994-7221
http://rred.mtri.org/rred/
Office:
Michigan Tech Research Institute
Michigan Technological University

App Idea: Allow Citizen Scientists to utilize the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model for predicting hillslope scale erosion

Empower citizens with tools and datasets for protecting invaluable natural resources. Understanding and managing soil erosion is vital for protecting our nation’s water quality and land productivity. The Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) is a physically-based hydrology and soil erosion model developed to predict soil detachment and movement.  WEPP utilizes climate, topography, soil, and vegetation properties to predict plant growth, residue decomposition and soil water balance on a daily time step and infiltration, runoff, and erosion on a storm-by-storm basis. WEPP can predict runoff, erosion and sediment delivery by a single storm event, month, year, or by average annual values for either an individual hillslope or a watershed containing many hillslopes, channels and impoundments. A key advantage of WEPP is it is a process based model and unlike empirical models can be applied outside the region where it was developed.

Parameterizing and running the WEPP model can be time consuming and difficult, therefore online hillslope interfaces such as Disturbed WEPP have been created to make the model more accessible (http://forest.moscowfsl.wsu.edu/cgi-bin/fswepp/wd/weppdist.pl).  Disturbed WEPP was developed for forest managers and has land cover for mature and young forests, skid trails, shrubs, good and poor grass communities, and low and high soil burn severity fires.   There are other online WEPP interfaces available, but Disturbed WEPP is one of the easiest to use.

Another new tool developed by Michigan Tech Research Institute in conjunction with NASA and the USDA Forest Service is an online erosion modeling database designed to rapidly generate spatial WEPP inputs for recently burned areas within the Continental United States (http://rred.mtri.org/rred/). Automating the creation of model inputs facilitates the wider use of more accurate, process-based models for spatially explicit predictions of post-fire erosion and runoff.

The idea for this App is to combine these two WEPP tools to further facilitate the use of the WEPP model. Having a mobile web app that combines these two WEPP tools has the potential to assist land managers and scientists in the field and can put advanced erosion modeling capabilities into the hands of citizen scientists.

Initial Meetings

First Team-Scientist Meeting, Thursday, 1-24-2019, 5 pm
Second Team-Scientist Meeting, Thursday, 1-31-2019,  5 pm
Prefer meeting using Zoom

Only HU4628 Scientists and App Ideas

The list below of scientists and app ideas are for teams composed of only HU4628 students.

Greg Newman – Research Scientist, Director, CitSci.org

Contact Information

Email: Gregory.Newman at colostate.edu
Cell Phone: (970) 491-0410
Office:
Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, NESB B206,
Campus delivery 1499, Colorado State University,
Fort Collins, CO 80523-1499

App Idea: CitSci Mobile

CitSci.org is an open and transparent citizen science data management platform that advances the utility, impacts, and outcomes of field-based citizen science programs globally. This platform supports more than 700 projects ranging from those that monitor water quality to maple syrup productivity and wildlife populations to invasive species. CitSci.org is unique among field-based platforms in that it is fully customizable and it allows projects to ‘create their own citizen science projects’ in a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach. Projects can define what they wish to measure, document how they measure it, and build customized datasheets for real-time data entry online and via mobile applications. This saves hundreds of projects the costs and hassles associated with creating their own web frontend and backend systems as well as their own custom mobile apps. The CitSci.org platform also provides an integrated suite of volunteer management capabilities plus data exploration and visualization tools to empower people to create their own visualizations of trends, relationships, and comparisons; and has been integrated with collaborative conservation systems for co-created citizen science and collaborative modeling. Tools also exist for volunteer communications, alerts/notifications, bulk uploading of legacy datasets, and download of data.

Initial Meetings

First Team-Scientist Meeting, Friday, 1-25-2019, 4 pm EST (2 pm MST)
Second Team-Scientist Meeting, Friday, 2-1-2019,  4 pm EST (2 pm MST)
Prefer meeting using Zoom