A botanist, a retired businesswoman, and a high school student walk into a bar. Or, maybe not a bar, what with the high school student. A museum. They and their team have a common problem—too many plant photos to analyze—and they find a solution: creating an online tool that lets regular, non-scientist people help do that analysis.
A botanist, a retired businesswoman, and a high school student walk into a bar. Or, maybe not a bar, what with the high school student. A museum. They and their team have a common problem—too many plant photos to analyze—and they find a solution: creating an online tool that lets regular, non-scientist people help do that analysis.
Liverworts, the plants in question—so called because their rounded primitive leaves are kind of liver-shaped—tend to fly under the radar. “When I tell people I study liverworts, my opening line is that it’s not catching,” says Matt von Konrat, the Field Museum’s collections manager of plants and lead author of a paper detailing the project in an issue of Applications in Plant Sciences dedicated to the digitization of botanical natural history collections. You’ve likely seen liverworts before, but you probably didn’t realize it. These ancient plants evolved millions of years before the dinosaurs, and they’re everywhere from deserts to the Arctic. But liverworts are tiny—about the size of an eyelash—and inconspicuous, growing like their cousins, mosses, on rocks and trees. Since they’re so small, they respond to climate change and global warming more quickly than bigger plants and animals, making them valuable to scientists. “They’re like a canary in a coal mine,” says von Konrat.
But using liverworts to better understand climate change requires a better understanding of liverworts. The intricacies of one liverwort species or another are often only visible through a microscope, and analyzing the details of hundreds of thousands of images of microscopic leaves isn’t exactly a plum job. “It’s tedious for one individual to go through these photos for hours on end,” says von Konrat. “But if you get a hundred people to do it for five minutes each, it’s a lot easier.”
The people von Konrat organized to share the load are citizen scientists—volunteers from a wide variety of backgrounds who contribute to scientific research. “Citizen science is an opportunity for an individual, group, or community to participate in and contribute to an active research program,” explains von Konrat. “It’s public contribution to science.”
Read more at Field Museum
Image: The tiny liverwort plants that are the subject of the Microplants project. (Credit: The Field Museum)
