[ExI] four seasons tree

Will Steinberg steinberg.will at gmail.com
Sat Dec 17 19:05:49 UTC 2016


I feel like it would be best to have a set of metrics which are applicable
to life in general:

Basal metabolic/photosynthetic rate
Respiration/carbon fixation rate
Fecundity
Rate of mutations' adoption into greater gene pool
Rate of change of population area (=div?)
'Trophic flux'--regarding their status as food and consumption of other
species (this is a binary function)
Change in migratory pattern idk what units to use
&c &c

On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 2:00 PM, Brian Manning Delaney <bmd54321 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> Spike,
>
> Very important topic!!
>
> How do we data-fy birds?  Bugs?
>>
>
> Well, the birds part has some cool data being gathered right now:
>
> http://ebird.org/content/ebird/
>
>
> eBird is permitting observers to quantify more than species and number
> observed as time goes on. Right now it's "breeding codes" (nest building,
> mating, territorial defense behavior, etc.), sex, approx. age, and a few
> other things. But more options will be added soon.
>
> Sweden has an amazing system called the Species Portal:
>
> http://www.artportalen.se/
>
> It enables people to record data on all life, not just birds.
>
> I became a crazy-avid birdwatcher a year ago, and have used both eBird and
> ArtPortalen, and have spoken with people running both projects. There's a
> problem. This is just an empirical observation. The why of it I don't know.
> With ArtPortalen, people tend to report rarities only. "Cool butterfly!
> I'll log in to my ArtPortalen account and report it!" What's needed are
> systematic observations of ALL butterflies (and not just butterflies) in a
> given area in a given period.
>
> With eBird, people tend to make systematic observations, but only of
> birds, of course. Perhaps it's just because it's less overwhelming to do so
> about birds only, or perhaps the interface is easier. But if we're going to
> ditch the ArtPortalen approached, we'd need to create eBee, eButterfly,
> eTree, etc.
>
>
> Perhaps we could get a jillion citizen scientists doing this kind of
>> automated observation.
>>
>
> The more automated, the better. We here tend to be optimists, and some
> reading this might think: "Forget the citizen! Just ask the NSA, GCHQ, FRA,
> all 7-11s, etc. to let us run some recognition algorithms on camera footage
> and the like. Surely such algorithms will be good enough by 2020 or
> something."
>
> The people at eBird think high-quality automated recognition of both
> images and sound is well over a decade away. And using images from
> surveillance cameras will be trickier than using images from an observer
> taking a high-quality picture. So we might not have a lot of automation
> soon.
>
> Meanwhile, check out eBird. Lots of fun.
>
> Oh, hey, wait. Maybe image-recognition isn't so far away:
>
> http://ebird.org/content/ebird/news/merlinvision201611/
>
> Pardon typos
> Brian
>
>
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