In this week’s edition of our Who’s who in the Zoo series, meet Yassine Benhajali, who runs Brain Match.

– Helen

Project: Brain Match

Researcher: Yassine Benhajali

Location: Anthropology Department, Université de Montréal, Canada.

What are your main research interests?

How nature and nurture interact to influence brain functioning.

Who else is in your project team? What are their roles?

Sebastian Urchs, Aman Badhwar and Pierre Bellec (Project Supervisor).

Tell us more about the data used in your project

Brain Match uses images of brain that have been made freely available thanks to the efforts of The Neuro Bureau (http://www.neurobureau.org/) and the ADHD-200 consortium (http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/indi/adhd200/index.html).

How do Zooniverse volunteers contribute to your research? 

In general, manual quality control of brain images is very subjective and time consuming task. Zooniverse volunteers are helping us in two key ways; firstly, they are helping to validate our brain image quality control procedure, and secondly, to produce enough rated images to train computers to perform the quality control automatically.

What have been the biggest challenges in setting up your project?

Our biggest challenge was to build simple and comprehensive instructions.

What discoveries, and other outputs, has your project led to so far?

To date, with the help of Zooniverse, we have developed the first quality control procedure on brain imaging that could be performed by both novice or expert neuroscience raters. They both agree on most of the ratings. We are hoping to present this work at a conference soon (http://www.neuroinformatics2018.org/abstracts/).

Once you’ve finished collecting data, what research questions do you hope to be able to answer?

The next step will be to train machine learning model based on the information from Zooniverse raters, and to test if this model can perform as well as human rater.

What’s in store for your project in the future?

More data to rate, and other brain imaging modalities.

What are your favourite other citizen research projects and why?

I like all wildlife protection projects.

What guidance would you give to other researchers considering creating a citizen research project?

Make your tutorial clear and concise.

And finally, when not at work, where are we most likely to find you?

Biking, running and swimming.

In this week’s edition of Who’s who in the Zoo, meet Mission Director of The Plastic Tide, Ellie Mackay.

– Helen 

Project: The Plastic Tide

Researcher: Ellie Mackay, Mission Director & Drone Pilot

Location: London, UK

What are your main research interests?

Plastic pollution, aerial imagery and image object recognition.

Who else is in your project team? What are their roles?

Peter Kohler, Co-Founder.

Tell us more about the data used in your project

The photographs come from aerial surveys of over 40 beaches in the UK and worldwide.

How do Zooniverse volunteers contribute to your research? 

They help us to train the algorithm to detect plastics automatically – this is a huge task which requires lots of photo tagging, so the volunteers help immensely with getting through all these images.

What have been the biggest challenges in setting up your project?

Financial backing/funding! We’ve had to self-fund to get the project off the ground and we’re now looking for sponsors to take the project to Phase 2.

What discoveries, and other outputs, has your project led to so far?

Extensive media coverage on multiple national and regional media channels as well as social media. Informed a secondary project on the psychological wellbeing of beach cleaning vs online volunteering.

Once you’ve finished collecting data, what research questions do you hope to be able to answer?

Where is the missing 99% of ocean plastic? Which beaches are most polluted and why? Which types of plastics wash up on different types of beaches? What are the most common types of plastic marine litter? How does plastic marine litter vary seasonally/after storms/over time/following innovations?

What’s in store for your project in the future?

Securing funding for:

• Increasing the accuracy of the autonomous detection
• Gathering more imagery from global contributors. -Accumulating further tagging by volunteers through Zooniverse
• Creating greater public awareness through documentary, video and audio promotion
• Generating engagement in citizen science through educational programmes and public engagement programmes
• Creating an open source global map of plastic pollution.

What are your favourite other citizen research projects and why?

Everything on Zooniverse!

What guidance would you give to other researchers considering creating a citizen research project?

Definitely use Zooniverse if you can – it makes life a lot easier and gives you access to a whole network of dedicated and brilliant volunteers.

And finally, when not at work, where are we most likely to find you?

Travelling, diving, filming or photographing the great outdoors, Speaking at Adventure Uncovered, RGS or similar events, or at schools across the UK Promoting plastic-free living through my website and social media.

In this week’s edition of Who’s who in the Zoo Meg Schwamb tells us more about the Planet Four: Terrains project.

– Helen

Project: Planet Four: Terrains

Researcher: Meg Schwamb, Assistant Scientist

Location: Gemini Observatory, Hilo, Hawaii

What are your main research interests?

I study how planets and their building blocks form and evolve, applying ground-based surveys to probe our Solar System’s small body reservoirs and citizen science to mine large datasets for Solar System science.

Who else is in your project team? What are their roles?

Candy Hansen (PSI) is the PI of the project, K-Michael Aye (LASP) & Anya Portyankina (LASP) are also members of the science team.

Tell us more about the data used in your project

The images reviewed on Planet Four: Terrains come from the Context Camera (CTX) aboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The Context Camera takes black and white wide view images (~30 km x ~60 km with ~6 m/pixel resolution) of the Martian surface that we cut into smaller chunks reviewed on the site.

How do Zooniverse volunteers contribute to your research? 

We ask volunteers to review the CTX subimages of the South Polar region of Mars and identify whether they see specific features: (1) araneiforms (including features with a central pit and radiating channels known as ‘spiders’) carved by carbon dioxide jets; (2) erosional depressions, troughs, mesas, ridges, and quasi-circular pits characteristic of the South Polar Residual Cap (SPRC) which we collectively refer to as ‘Swiss cheese terrain’, and (3) craters.

What have been the biggest challenges in setting up your project?

Figuring out the format and contents of the classification exports.

What discoveries, and other outputs, has your project led to so far?

Our first paper was accepted last year to a journal. Planet Four: Terrains has identified new regions of carbon dioxide jet activity including areas with jet carved channels (spiders/araneiforms) on geologic units previously thought to be resistant to the process (locations the spiders/araneiforms weren’t expected to be). More details here (http://blog.planetfour.org/2017/08/29/planet-four-terrains-first-science-paper-accepted-for-publication/).

Once you’ve finished collecting data, what research questions do you hope to be able to answer?

What is the distribution of aranaeiforms (spiders) over the South Polar regions? Why do we find araneiforms (spiders) in specific locations outside of the South Polar Layered Deposits?

What’s in store for your project in the future?

Expanding to a larger search area and exploring areas further from the South Pole of Mars to see how far North spiders may exist.

What are your favourite other citizen research projects and why?

I’m currently involved in several Zooniverse projects, so I think they are all my favorites: Planet Four, Planet Four: Ridges, and Comet Hunters.

What guidance would you give to other researchers considering creating a citizen research project?

Be cognizant that combining the multiple volunteer classifications together is likely very different from what you’ve done in the past for data analysis. Also, treat your project volunteers’ as your collaborators.

And finally, when not at work, where are we most likely to find you?

Baking and watching soccer (hoping the Chicago Fire make the playoffs).

For more information, check out the Planet Four Blog Post.

In the third of our Who’s who in the Zoo series, meet Etch A Cell‘s Dr Martin Jones

– Helen

Project: Etch A Cell

Researcher: Martin Jones, Deputy Head of Microscopy Prototyping

Location: Electron Microscopy Science Technology Platform, The Francis Crick Institute, London, UK

What are your main research interests?

Imaging and image analysis.

Who else is in your project team? What are their roles?

Lucy Collinson (head of EM STP) leads the EM team, Chris Peddie (Principal Laboratory Research Scientist) acquired the data, Anne Weston (Senior Laboratory Research Scientist) performed the expert analysis.

Tell us more about the data used in your project

The images are from our “serial block face scanning electron microscope” and are of small groups of HeLa cells (a type of cancer cell). The electron microscope allows us to see objects down to a few billionths of a metre in size. Each cell is divided up into around 200-300 individual sections (like a loaf of sliced bread) so we can see the insides of the cell. To start with we hope to analyse around 50 cells, but as a core facility we have an endless supply of different types of data we’d like to analyse!

How do Zooniverse volunteers contribute to your research? 

The Zooniverse volunteers help us with our “segmentation” task – tracing a line over the nuclear envelope, which is a very important membrane inside the cell that separates the nucleus from the rest of the cell.

What have been the biggest challenges in setting up your project?

One of the key advantages of the citizen science approach is that we can have several different volunteers analyse each image, allowing us to combine the results to get a statistical understanding of the data. Combining the volunteers’ work in the most effective way possible turns out to be pretty tricky though! Especially since our data is stored as lots of individual lines, meaning a simple average doesn’t really work.

What discoveries, and other outputs, has your project led to so far?

The first thing we wanted to make sure was that the data we get is good enough, which thankfully it looks like it is! Even that was perhaps a bit unexpected to some people! We’ve found it has been popular as an education and outreach tool too, with reports of teachers using it in their classes to teach about cells. We’ve also shown it off at an event at the Natural History Museum in London and a CRUK event in Manchester and spoken about it at several conferences around the world. We’re writing up the first journal article about it right now in fact!

Once you’ve finished collecting data, what research questions do you hope to be able to answer?

While electron microscopy produces amazingly detailed images, there are very few studies where data has been fully quantified at large scale, since it’s such a labour-intensive process at the moment. By measuring the shapes of each object (nucleus, mitochondria etc.) in different types of cell we can perform robust quantitative comparisons that are not currently possible. This sort of knowledge will help us to understand many different diseases, like cancer, malaria and tuberculosis, as well as help us find effective treatments for those diseases.

What’s in store for your project in the future?

There’s a lot more to come from Etch a cell! We have plenty more data that we’d like to analyse in the same way – tracing outlines – but for some other objects inside a cell we think a different approach might be easier and more effective. We’re working on a few options, and hopefully future iterations will be easier for people to work with on mobile devices. In parallel, we’re also building an artificial intelligence system to use the results from Etch a cell to enable us to train computers to be as good at the task as humans.

What are your favourite other citizen research projects and why?

Bash The Bug was released at the same time as Etch a cell and is a really great project. EyeWire is another electron microscopy project that has been groundbreaking in the field of “connectomics” – trying to understand how the cells in brains are connected together. Cancer Research UK has produced several different projects with a great deal of success, it was our initial interaction with their team that brought citizen science to our attention in the first place.

What guidance would you give to other researchers considering creating a citizen research project?

Have a play around with the project builder, setting up a basic project is really easy!

And finally, when not at work, where are we most likely to find you?

I try to get outdoors as much as possible, whether that’s walking, running or cycling.

In the second of our series of ‘meet the researcher’ blog posts, meet PhD student Anabelle Cardoso, who leads the very popular elephant-spotting project, Elephant Expedition. 

– Helen

Anabelle (fourth from left) and the on-the-ground research team at the research station in Gabon

Project: Elephant Expedition

Researcher: Anabelle Cardoso, PhD Candidate

Location: School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, UK

What are your main research interests?

‘Elephant Expedition’ is part of my PhD research at the University of Oxford, which I started in 2015. Our research is about understanding how forest elephants affect the ecosystems they live in.

Forest elephants are extremely endangered, largely due to hunting for ivory. However, because they live in such mysterious and remote forests, we don’t know as much about them as we would like to. Learning more about these important and threatened animals is critical, as the better you understand an animals ecology the more effectively you can advocate for and plan its conservation.

In our study site in Gabon, and across Africa, valuable savanna habitat is being lost due to over-expanding forests as a result of human-induced global change. Normally, you wouldn’t think of growing forests as a threat, but savanna habitat is home to most of the remaining large mammals in Africa and performs many important ecosystem functions, including carbon storage, so loss of savannas is a global concern. Elephants are ecosystem engineers meaning that they have a disproportionately large impact on the ecosystems they live in. This gives then the unique potential to affect how much forest or savanna is in a landscape, so they can help protect savannas in the face of expanding forests. Most of the research on how elephants might do this has been done on bush elephants, which are a completely different species to the forest elephants of central Africa. Our research aims to remedy this by focusing on how forest elephants affect the forest and savanna balance of the landscape they live in.

In order to better understand forest elephants, we first need to know where they are, so we’ve set up a network of hidden camera traps to photograph them as they move through the forest. Our 40 camera traps are attached to trees and take a photo when triggered by motion or heat. They are super useful for monitoring dangerous and elusive animals like forest elephants because they function 24/7 and can give us a really good idea about where in the landscape the elephants are spending their time without us having to disturb the elephants by following them on foot. This is where the citizen scientists come in – because the camera traps are quite sensitive they don’t only capture images of elephants, but also gorillas, chimpanzees, buffalo, antelope, or even passing birds and bats. The citizen scientists help us to classify all the images into categories based on what’s in them. We can then convert these classifications into data about where the elephants are at what times of year, and link it with our other environmental measurements to draw conclusions. What the citizen scientists contribute is absolutely essential to the research, and forms the backbone of everything we do.

Who else is in your project team? What are their roles?

Yadvinder Malhi (Oxford), Imma Oliveras (Oxford), William Bond (University of Cape Town), and Kate Abenermethy (University of Stirling) supervise me; and Josue Edzang-Ndong (ANPN Gabon) and David Lehmann (ANPN Gabon, University of Stirling) and Kathryn Jeffery (ANPN Gabon, University of Stirling) help managed the project on the ground in Gabon. A special mention should be made to @melvinosky and @jwidness, our wonderful project moderators.

Tell us more about the data used in your project

We have 40 motion and heat sensitive cameras set up along rainforest edges in Gabon, they take photos of all passing animals (mostly elephants, but also a lot of gorillas, chimpanzees, buffalo, leopard, and red river hogs!). These are the images that the volunteers help to classify.

How do Zooniverse volunteers contribute to your research? 

In our project, volunteers are shown an image from one of our camera traps and they have to classify it according to what animal is in it. If the image contains a forest elephant, they also have to count how many elephants they see. The project is simple, so volunteers of all ages and skill levels can join, plus they can classify hundreds of images and therefore get lots of opportunities to spot cool animals.

The project’s feasibility relies on citizen scientists – from our network of hidden camera traps in the rainforest of Gabon we have nearly 2 million photographs we need to analyse and this would be impossible without the help of our dedicated volunteers. To date, there are 10,000 citizen scientists signed up on our website from all parts of the world, as long as you have an internet connection you can join the team.

Citizen science is wonderful because everybody benefits. As researchers we can process very large data sets (like our set of elephant photos) by harnessing the power of thousands of minds all working towards a common goal. This enables us to expand our research scope far beyond what would be possible as individuals – it’s the ultimate global collaboration. The citizen scientists benefit too. Volunteers are exposed to experiences that they might not otherwise have access to, for example in Elephant Expedition you essentially go on a virtual safari through the central African rainforest looking for forest elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, leopards or mandrills (a type of monkey) – this just isn’t something most people will ever get the chance to do in real life. The project also has a vibrant online community of volunteers. One of the volunteers is a cancer sufferer and she says that participating in our project allows her to not be excluded from doing something just because she’s sick, it gives her a way to pass the time in hospital and makes her feel part of something meaningful.

Since we have so many camera traps and they are highly sensitive, we have many photographs – nearly 2 million! The photographs have a time and location stamp, so each time a volunteer classifies an image as having an elephant in it we know when and where that elephant was sighted. This information from the volunteers is synthesised and is what we’re using to build a time series of elephant habitat use across the landscape. Without the volunteers we would have no way of analysing the images, and therefore no data with which to answer our research questions. Citizen scientists play an integral role in the success of the project, the bottom line is that without them the project wouldn’t be able to work.

What have been the biggest challenges in setting up your project?

It isn’t really a challenge, more a learning journey. I think the amount of time it takes was a challenge, that you always have to be connected to answer questions and see to issues, and of course just learning how to manage such massive data sets has been a steep learning curve! It’s been great though, and I’ve been really humbled by the experience, because all of the volunteers on the project are so lovely and helpful it’s been amazing to be a part of.

What discoveries, and other outputs, has your project led to so far?

We haven’t started doing data analysis yet but we are very excited to see the results! We will be keeping all the volunteers updated on the project page as things continue.

What’s in store for your project in the future?

We have one more small run of final photos, and then we will begin the data analysis and writing up some research! It’s all very exciting and should be coming together in the next few months.

What are your favourite other citizen research projects and why?

Oh! I loved Snapshot Serengetti!

What guidance would you give to other researchers considering creating a citizen research project?

The potential for citizen science research is truly astounding. The world is a big place and the internet is able to connect us with one another. There are millions of potential volunteers across the globe who care as much about what you are researching as you do, and citizen science is an amazing way to connect with them. The best way to make a project effective is to find clever ways of linking volunteers and researchers according to the research interests of both. I think project effectiveness can also be measured by what both researchers and volunteers gain, for example did the research fulfil its scientific aims? Was the scope of the research enhanced by being able to use a global network of volunteers? Did the volunteers feel they gained some enjoyment and knowledge from the process of engaging with it? Would volunteers educate those around them about the research?

When designing a citizen science project, we found it most important to always remember that the people who volunteer to help you are smart and they care about what you’re researching. By including them in the project they become a part of the project, so always appropriately respect their time and skills. Our project depends on people sacrificing time out of their lives to help reach a research goal, so we always make sure we put in the time to communicate with volunteers, answer questions, and just generally engage personally with the people who make the project possible.

And finally, when not at work, where are we most likely to find you?

In Oxford, writing my thesis or destressing with some yoga, or maybe at home in Cape Town, South Africa, walking on the mountain or swimming in the sea. I also love to take road-trips across Southern Africa, there’s always something beautiful to see!

To learn more about Elephant Expedition, check out Annabelle’s Twitter account (@ellieexpedition) or Instagram Page (@elephantexpedition), or click here to go directly to the project.