Where exactly was a museum specimen collected? A new Zooniverse project invites volunteers to help turn location information from museum records into points on a map, making biodiversity data easier for researchers to use. The project also introduces new mapping tools that will eventually support many different kinds of research on Zooniverse.
Yesterday, we launched a brand-new project: Notes from Nature – Putting Biodiversity on the Map. This project invites volunteers to help georeference museum specimen records by matching locality descriptions to places on a map. Museum specimen labels include locality information to describe the place where a specimen was collected. Georeferencing is the process of converting that locality information into geographic coordinates (e.g. latitude and longitude).
Developing new mapping tools for Zooniverse
Prior to this project, the Notes from Nature research team would ask volunteers to transcribe specimen records in Zooniverse, then export the locality data to GEOLocate for georeferencing. GEOLocate includes tools for automated georeferencing (based on the transcribed locality information), and the data would then be reviewed and corrected on the GEOLocate platform.
In Notes from Nature – Putting Biodiversity on the Map, Zooniverse developers worked with the Notes from Nature and GEOLocate teams to create new tools and infrastructure to allow Zooniverse volunteers to review and correct (if needed!) georeferenced data imported from GEOLocate. As part of this effort, we created new Zooniverse infrastructure that will allow projects to:
- Display map data from sources like OpenStreetMap, as well as other data formats like WMS, XYZ, and COG
- Ingest and display annotation data from external sources, such as machine-predicted annotation data from GEOLocate
- Collect volunteer annotations of map data, using drawing tools that are familiar to our Zooniverse community
- Record and export Zooniverse classifications in geoJSON, a standard format for representing geographic data
This work allows researchers to draw on the expertise and collective effort of the Zooniverse community, as well as the automated georeferencing tools provided by GEOLocate. By connecting these existing tools, and combining machine effort with people power, we can help researchers increase the speed at which they are able to digitize these records.
This project is part of a larger, National Science Foundation-funded effort to bring mapping infrastructure into Zooniverse. Without maps, overlaying datasets or analyzing spatial relationships can be challenging and often impossible. These new mapping tools will allow the Zooniverse volunteer community to help researchers do things like translate text into map coordinates, identify and trace features on maps, and even align historical and modern imagery!
What’s next for mapping tools on Zooniverse?
Notes from Nature – Putting Biodiversity on the Map is the first of three Zooniverse mapping projects that we are launching as part of our initial exploration and development effort. We will post a new blog with each project launch, explaining the mapping tools we’ve developed for each one.
In 2027, we will be looking for additional projects to test out the generalizability of our new mapping tools and infrastructure, before they eventually become available as part of the Zooniverse Project Builder. If you are interested, please sign up using this form.
