About

Biotracker combines computer vision, state-of-the-art mobile phone technologies, and the Internet to encourage science enthusiasts to gather biological data, and draws, when necessary, upon the skills of expert scientists and technologies to help identify species. Biotracker incorporates online games, mobile missions and team and individual collections to help document a wide variety of species, as well as to engage individuals with the environment around them. Biotracker is partnering with the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), a global project to populate web pages for every species on Earth, to create a collection of tagged pictures and associated metadata for their website. For more information on how we initially conceived of this project, and our proposed goals please see the Biotracker's NSF Project Proposal.

Mobile Crowdsourcing Project Announcement

The Biotrackers NSF project is pleased to announce the launch of a mobile, citizen science crowdsourcing project in partnership with iNaturalist, Leafsnap, and the Encyclopedia of Life. The goal of the project is to dramatically increase the number of species that can be automatically identified using the free iPhone Leafsnap app. We are calling all nature enthusiasts to join the fun by visiting our project page, which includes simple instructions on how to participate.

Project Team

Our project is an interdisciplinary collaboration that draws on expertise in computer vision, human computer interaction, biology and motivational theory. Some of the other affiliate organizations and projects involved in Biotracker are:

• The University of Maryland's iSchool
• Brigham Young University's Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology
• LeafSnap
• The Smithsonian Institution
• The University of Maryland's Department of Computer Science

Our work is made possible by NSF Award SES 0968546 for a proposal entitled: "Biotracker - Melding human and machine intelligence to create large-scale collaborative systems."