[ExI] confused trees and bees, FW: Season's Greetings from the Federation

[spike]

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Alex Blainey
Sent: Saturday, December 21, 2013 6:35 PM
To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
Subject: Re: [ExI] confused trees and bees, FW: Season's Greetings from the Federation

 

>…Ah the annual Bee update. Ive noticed a decline this year in the UK but havn't seen a rise in dead Bees. What I have also noticed recently and this worried me was when working in the woods clearing a couple of paths there was a very noticable lack of insect life in and under the leaf litter. !!!!!
In one area I raked away about an inch of leaves uncovering the peat/earth from a patch roughly 20 sq ft and then looked for insects. No woodlice, millipedes or even springtails. All I saw was one lonely small spider.

>…Now that is truly worrying. Nothing of note has changed in the local environment apart from a really wet year and the Oak trees have dropped more acorns than I have ever seen! 

 

 
 
OK then, all this makes my point exactly.  We have a million pairs of eyes and no good way to integrate observations.  We have people everywhere who casually observe wildlife and may see something important, but we are left with no unified means to collect these kinds of observations.  This has always been the case, but now we have the theoretical ability to make sense of those collective observations.  I don’t know how to do it, but there should be some means of reducing bug counts to locations and hard data by some means.  Over time, important patterns should emerge.
 
Global warming is a topic of great interest in the past decade.  How about some kind of citizen scientist operated home weather station that bluetooths data to your computer which then sends it to some central location?  We could rig something cheap, something Newtonmas-able gift idea, something which would collect air temperature and light-level measurements, or perhaps humidity as well.  Then we get a thousand data points for every one we get now, even if we accept that there are uncontrolled factors influencing the data.
 
It would be so cool to figure out some way to make home security cameras somehow do extra duty as a wildlife observation station.  I use mine that way: I have gotten some spectacular bird photos with it, but no perps so far.  People will buy home security cameras.  We should figure out ways to use these unblinking eyes to do more stuff.
 
But back to the original point, how can we ever notice collectively if things like millipedes, woodlice and roaches went missing?  For the bees it is easy because citrus and nut growers immediately pay a lotta money for them.  With ants we can get data from the local hardware store regarding boric acid sales.  But what if something else killed off the more obscure bugs that almost nobody likes?  Would we notice?
 
spike
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