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GigaMacro Imaging Tests, Tips & Tricks

8/30/2016

 
By Andrea Kautz, Entomologist, Powdermill Nature Reserve, Carnegie Museum of Natural History
TBD

Tests
​Sample Images
Tips and Best Practices

National Water Quality Database Analysis for Taxa List

8/29/2016

 
By Matt Wilson, Entomologist at Stroud Water Research Center

We were curious to find out what are the dominant stream taxa across the Great Plains, Eastern Temperate Forest, and Northern Forest ecoregions?
 
For most field ecologists – myself included – we tend to focus on a few research questions and/or geographic areas. As a result, it can be natural to incorporate what we see in our research and in our samples into our mental model of which taxa are more broadly common in streams.
 
In other words, if we focus our research on the changes resulting in headwater streams from agriculture then most of what we see reflects the animals present in small streams and the tolerant taxa found in agriculture. Or if we focus on conservation of a specific watershed then our mental model has a tendency to narrow in geography. To compensate for this, and remove any personal bias from taxa selections, I took advantage of a dataset that is both professionally curated and publicly available from the National Water Quality Monitoring Council (NWQMC; http://waterqualitydata.us/).
 
This dataset included decades of samples from the US Geological Survey, Environmental Protection Agency, and NWQMC collected across the United States and a few select sites in Canada. 

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NMQMC Portal.

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Volunteer Biomonitoring Organization (VBMO) Observation

8/8/2016

 
By Lauren Allen

​A big part of this project is interacting, observing, and co-designing training materials with volunteers and facilitators of volunteer biomonitoring organizations (VBMOs). Volunteer biomonitoring is an important part of the citizen science movement in the United States, and especially here in PA and the mid-Atlantic, where groundwater, streams, and watersheds are rapidly changing and can be threatened by development, mining, and oil and gas drilling.

One of our partner organizations is a VBMO that has an education-focused program with youth from local high schools. We spent time with these engaged students of urban ecology each week during their intensive 5-week program as they learned about stream ecology, freshwater macroinvertebrates, and sampled for them in several different locations in their urban parks and in several rural locations as well.
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Key used in streamside training
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Magnifying bug box
When I spend time with volunteers and learners, I try to spend the first part of my time with them listening to the things that they talk about and the ideas and questions that they have. This group of young people were very inquisitive about the world around them--something that probably led to their participating in this program. They asked lots of questions about trees, birds, insects, and the ecology of the parks and streams that we visited over the past few weeks.

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Observing Observation

8/1/2016

 
By Lauren Allen, Learning Media Design Center @CMU

Cognitive Task Analysis & Contextual Inquiry

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Unknown specimens in their vials. Some taxonomists knew family and had a good guess on species without even removing specimens from the vial. Others worked through the dichotomous key to find family and genus classifications.

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    Project Team

    An interdisciplinary team
    ​of entomologists, learning scientists, software engineers and designers collaborating to improve macroinvertebrate identification training and technologies with volunteer biomonitoring organizations.

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Partners

Learning Media Design Center@CMU
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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant #1623969.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF. ​​

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