Cheong Siew Ann
Mass Blooms and Climate Change: A Crowd Sensing Project
Flowers are blooming en mass in Singapore right now. It has been suggested that such a mass bloom is the result of climate change. As a scientist, I believe this hypothesis can be tested. Such changes may not be apparent in a single bloom, but may be discovered if we consider the time pattern of mass blooms over many such episodes. If the change occurred in the past, I know how to find when this happened from the pattern of mass blooms. If the change is imminent, I also know how to detect its early warning signatures.
Seeing that climate change is a topic on your minds, and that many has take notice of the mass bloom, I figure this would be a fantastic citizen science project! Citizen science is not new. The American Ornithologist Society has for many years mobilized hobbyist bird watchers to understand changes to the geographical distributions of American bird species, and thus the impact of human settlements. They have even rediscovered a woodpecker species thought to be extinct this way!
The idea behind this crowd sensing project is that plants are sensors of climate change, and rare mass blooms are sensitive to very specific combinations of climatic signals. We are then sensors of mass blooms, because we appreciate their beauty. I hope through people observing mass blooms, which in turn monitor climatic variations, we can learn something about the underlying climate change.
In this project, I would need your help gathering data on mass blooms. The kind of data I am looking for includes:
(1) newspaper and magazine articles reporting mass blooms (for each article, I will need its scan (or photo), the name of the newspaper/magazine, the date of the newspaper/magazine, and the page the article appeared on);
(2) TV news reports, if anyone has access to archives (for each TV news report, I need a video clip of the report (if permitted by copyrights), the name of the program segment, the date of the program, and the time the report was aired);
(3) photographs of the mass blooms (for each photograph, I will need the digital file, or a scan of the photograph if it is an older hardcopy print. For older prints, I need the date the photograph was taken to appear on the photograph, or some documentary proof that it was taken on the date asserted).
From the data, I would need your help to extract the following information:
(1) the date and duration of a mass bloom;
(2) the geographical locations where the mass blooms were recorded;
(3) the species of plants participating in the mass blooms.
On my part, I will provide regular updates on the progress of the project to all participants. I might also post more specific calls for additional data where I have identified gaps in the overall picture of the mass blooms, whenever there is a need to do so. For now, people can join the project by responding to this post. Please help share this post with friends you think will be interested to contribute. The crowd sensing aspect of this project is novel, and will have to be reported if we ever write this study up for publication. This means that I will need to know who invited you to this project. This information will eventually be published in the form of a graph, where nodes are participants, and directed links connect a participant with another participant he or she invited. If and when the number of participants become large enough, I will create a FB page to host all data and discussions on this project.
In the very likely event you did not read the post let me summarize. The prof wanted to study the mass blooming but the way he was collecting information was very inefficient in my view. I thought there should be a platform that eases the process; makes it easier for people to submit the data as well as for the prof to collect and study the data. Hence the inspiration for my project.
Why fruiting trees? Well I looked out of my window and saw mango trees.
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