(Lightly edited for readability)
Speakers: Manasi Mukherjee, Philipp Olbrich, Ghazala Shahabuddin, Subhra Priyadarshini
00:02 Support announcement: This episode is produced with support from DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance
00:26 Subhra Priyadarshini: Scientists have many sophisticated and hi-tech ways to measure and record our planet’s biodiversity, especially in these times of a climate emergency when biodiversity has become a rare treasure to preserve.
In this episode of the Nature India Podcast series “Our Mobile World”, we talk about how scientists are putting to use smart mobile devices to keep the natural diversity of the planet intact and help monitor and restore it for the future generations. I am your host Subhra Priyadarshini.
Mobile phones are being increasingly used to document and map biodiversity. For instance, in many citizen science projects, mobile phones are used to capture images and record audio of animals and birds, which can then be used by researchers for species identification, distribution mapping, and conservation efforts.
Also, these devices have come in handy in providing solutions to various other hurdles that ecologists often face. So let us head straight to Manasi Mukherjee, programme manager at Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur who is telling us about some of these problems.
01:54 Manasi Mukherjee: One of the most important problems being data obviously. Because it is very, very important to have huge amounts of data when you're going for any kind of ecological analysis that is necessary for understanding the conservation approaches, or restoration approaches. And this data being large scale, which is spatial, as well as temporal takes a huge amount of time. I do think that mobile phones have become very, very important, playing a major role in reducing both the time as well as the effort in terms of resources to, you know, make or create the pace faster.
02:36 Subhra Priyadarshini: So that’s about the huge amounts of data that phones can quickly and easily process. How else are ecologists putting mobile phones to use?
02:47 Manasi Mukherjee: We all talk about community science, a science where all kinds of people can participate and help the scientists with large amounts of data. Crowd sourced information through citizen science. Monitoring anything by remote locations. That's always possible through phones, since people, it's like everybody has a phone in hand, right?
03:10 Subhra Priyadarshini: And, of course, we have seen how mobile phones have helped during natural disasters or accidents.
03:17 Manasi Mukherjee: There are certain kinds of environmental accidents that has happened like oil spills, or forest fires or natural disasters, and no ecologist would be able to act on it unless and until the information reaches to him or her or he or she can give back the kind of suggestions one can. And this kind of rapid response to environmental events is possible through mobile technology. Environmental education and awareness is hugely possible through mobile phones and apps that are available, there are ‘n’ number of apps that are available which are related to ecology and nature.
03:55 Subhra Priyadarshini: Right, and you could potentially predict these disasters too.
03:59 Manasi Mukherjee: Predictive modeling that is necessary for understanding the threats that are happening to any kind of ecosystem or biodiversity is always possible through the kind of data we collect through all these technological interventions that are happening where mobile phones are playing a major role.
04:16 Subhra Priyadarshini: IITJodhpur has a citizen science project called Bio Blitz helmed by Professor Mitali Mukherjee, head of the bioscience and bioengineering department.
04:28 Manasi Mukherjee: We wanted all the citizens, the local people of this area, to participate in walks where they would be taken around and introduced to the local ecology, how they can actually help in conserving and preserving the biodiversity. We have more than 500 participants. We have launched an app called Prakriti, to get feeds of observations from any observer through mobile phones, in the form of photographs or in form of write ups and just mentioning whatever you have seen, and it has geotags.
In the Thar Desert, there is a species called Prosopis juliflora which is very detrimental to the ecosystem. So we are also trying to assess the invasive pollution through this BioBlitz Program.
05:20 Subhra Priyadarshini: Similarly, in the global south, the iNaturalist App, has emerged as a go-to app for hikers, campers, and anyone who loves spending time outdoors. So for example walking through tall grass, would you know the difference between a harmless gopher snake and a rattlesnake, by their markings? The iNaturalist app will tell you what you're looking at and everything you might need to know about it.
So from noting down these observations to acting upon them, cell phones are of great help. Here’s, Philipp Olbrich, advisor at GIZ, German International Development Cooperation Agency, in India. He works closely with government agencies, research organizations, and universities, and is telling us how these phones help them find solutions.
06:16 Philipp Olbrich: It helps people become citizen scientists in reporting information about their immediate environment. One major function, especially of smartphones, but also a few other devices, is the GPS function, which is very instrumental in helping map environmental incidents from biodiversity of wildfires to forest degradation, crop health, etc.
06:39 Subhra Priyadarshini: Right. Simple mobile phone-based tools are helping collate massive amounts of data. Ghazala Shahabuddin, an ecologist who works with the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE), tells us how collection of large data has become a reality.
07:01 Ghazala Shahabuddin: So one thing is just the collection of data over large scales, over big areas. A mobile phone is now equipped with a GPS, it has an altimeter, it has a camera. One can actually get a lot of sight data wherever one is working. Second, the actual taxa that you're working on, say a bird species or butterflies in a given area, you can just collect data really quickly using the apps that are now available for smartphones, such as the Merlin app or eBird.
Many scientists have created these identification apps, like plant net, where you can upload a photograph of a plant or a butterfly and get it identified almost instantaneously by experts, or by the gallery, which is already available online.
Knowledge about biodiversity is actually increasing because of smartphones. So we have people now taking photographs of, you know, species all over the place. And very often you find records of species that may not have been seen in a given area for the last several years, or it is a rare or endangered species that we didn't know still existed.
08:15 Subhra Priyadarshini: Surely, data collected through mobile phones can also signal and help monitor the real-time impacts of development projects on biodiversity. Ghazala explains how these datasets can mitigate the detrimental impacts of infrastructure development.
08:35 Ghazala Shahabuddin: Species habitat modelling has become much more easy now. We have a lot of endangered species. We do need to figure out how to conserve the species. Geographic occurrence data is extremely useful for species habitat modelling. I, personally, have been involved in looking at land use change, and its impact on biodiversity. None of this data could have been collected without the involvement of a number of people who have smartphones. So for instance, if forests are changing to monocultures or if a wetland is getting fragmented by a dam or a highway, then we have real time data to be able to understand the potential impacts of these development projects. And this is something that the government needs to know the NGOs need to know before we actually execute.
09:21 Subhra Priyadarshini: Great. Scientists also rely on large-scale citizen science data to track the status of wild bird species. Ghazala mentioned eBird India, a well-known platform that crowdsources bird data.
09:39 Ghazala Shahabuddin: For instance, we launched the state of India's birds report of 2023. And this is based on millions and millions of data points collected by citizen science all over India using their smartphones. And this is going to be extremely useful for many different purposes, including just looking at conservation status of protected areas, endangered species occurrence, it's just an amazing tool that has been developed as a part of this analysis. It's called the minor tool, and you can literally go into the remotest part of India, figure out what is the importance of this area for endangered species. For Schedule 1 species in the Wildlife Protection Act of India or for IUCN Red listed species, you can even find out trends over time. So it's really remarkable what has been done by the state of India's eBird team.
We found that smartphones are a fantastic way of involving these young people because everyone now knows how to use a smartphone.
So two things are happening simultaneously. One is that they are learning about the natural environment around them. Second, they are able to develop a livelihood based on nature tourism, which again has spin-off effects on awareness and citizen science. So I think it's really fantastic and it's really led to a lot of learning at the rural level and improved access to science and science education.
11:12 Subhra Priyadarshini: Well, if we now know more about the natural world around us, from forest owlets to dung beetles, it is all thanks to the various mobile apps that have done wonders for our record keeping and monitoring, also like Ghazala mentions strengthening the science-society interface.
Stay tuned to this series “Our mobile World “ to learn about many such ways in which these little gadgets penetrate our lives. Subscribe to the Nature India podcast on your favourite podcast platform. We will come to you soon with another interesting episode of “Our Mobile World.” This is your host Subhra Priyadarshini.
12:16 Support announcement: This episode is produced with support from DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance.
