Jungle Rhythms: beta trial

I’ve been quietly working on a citizen science project called Jungle Rhythms. The Jungle Rhythms project is started to ensure the preservation and transcriptions of historical hand-drawn observations of the life cycle events of over 500 different tropical tree species. These observations together with meteorological data will tell us the response of a tree’s life cycle events to changing environmental conditions, ultimately allowing us to predict the state of the forest in a changing climate.

Below you see an example of a sheet with hand-observations, where on the horizontal grid lines fine pencil marks delineate the timing of life cycle events.

In order to test the workflow of the annotation and gather feedback on the content of the project I released a public beta. In under a day the 90 images provided as a test case were viewed by 15 individual users. A big thank you goes out to the mostly anonymous zooniverse user community for annotating this dataset and providing me with the necessary feedback to ensure a high quality project.

The feedback was in general positive, recurring comments were made on the clarity of the project description or intended use of the data. Stepping back a bit I can see these shortcomings and I will address these in the next and probably final release of the project. The annotation data gathered will also provide me with a sense of accuracy and consistency of the classification between users. Once these annotation data are processed I will report her on my blog as well as on the Jungle Rhythms project page.

Once more my thanks go out to all the zooniverse users who tested my project!