Welcome!

More information about CAnMove and the research activities within the programme can be found at:

http://canmove.lu.se

onsdag 21 maj 2014

Sten K Johnson Foundation funds CAnMove E-book project

Newly established (2012) Sten K Johnson Foundation has decided to fund a planned CAnMove e-book entitled; "Butterfly wings, bat radar and sea
monsters - this is how and why the creatures move."The book is an aim to inspire and draw high school students to natural sciences, and animal tracking in particular.

We will receive 150.000 SEK at a ceremony at the Sten K Johnson Center at School of Economics and Management Lund University in June. We are of course honored and excited!

The e-book planning is going on right now. You might very well be the PhD student or post-doc that we will contact for partaking in the e-book. We want to share personal stories about science, being a researcher, scientific methods and technologies used for animal tracking.

We will also incorporate in the e-book, 1-minute films from the field/lab/wind tunnel that YOU provide! This is of course a call to action. You have the chance to give away cool events during field work to young people across Sweden that eventually will have the e-book in their computers in school.

Send your films to caroline.bolmeson@biol.lu.se.

Good luck!




lördag 17 maj 2014

Citizen and science Workshop 24 of April - recap


Remember SETI?

Crowdsourcing data from happy amateur scientists is not new, but develops very fast right now thanks to tools (smartphones, internet, etc.) and virtual communitites. SETI@home was a project initiated 1999. To pick up signals from intelligent extraterrestrial life, people were encouraged to let the SETI@home software run on their computer as a screen saver. The more people involved, the bigger the chance to pick up such a signal. 

The 1-day international workshop

Åke Lindström arranged a workshop the 24 of April, to address the current development and challenges with crowdsourcing data.
In case you missed the excellent Citizen Science workshop, keep on reading or go to:
I have been mulling over the right way to write this blog post for a while now. There was so much useful information for scientists aspiring to crowdsource data, during this workshop.
Therefore, I have been compiling some of the best tips from a few of the speakers in this post.

Jonathan Silverman works with iSpot, which is a site and tool online. 150 organisations work with iSpot and most users are students and universities. You can upload an image of any plant or animal to iSpot, and get almost instantaneous answer to what species it is. This is crowdsourcing for anybody. iSpot helps people learn. The longer you have been observing, the more likely you are to put an ID yourself instead of waiting for someone else to do it. Also there is an iSpot quiz to help you sharpen your identification skills. Everything is geo-referenced as well, except for species on IUCN Red List of threatened species (that are geo-referenced in an area, but not to the precise sighting).

Helen Roy – the landscape of citizen science, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, UK
One of the raison-détre for the Ladybird Survey UK, is to record ladybirds across the British Isles, linking their distribution to climate change. Helen is an enthusiastic bug scientist, and being very interested in crowdsourcing for science, she eventually wrote “Guide to Citizen Science” – UK Environmental Observation Framework. She and her co-workers report a surprising finding in that book; there is not one type of person that engage in crowdsourcing, but all kinds of people with different interests, goals and ambitions. (What? Are you saying that we are all nerds?)
Best tips: Clarity of goals for the people joining the crowdsourcing project is essential! Explicit, simple aims for the participants. No need to argue; the Ladybird Survey UK has been extremely successful. Important to identify and understand target participants (for example children) so that we can shape the crowdsourcing accordingly.

Kjell Bolmgren – Turning passion into practice, Swedish University of Aricultural Sciences
For 73 years, Gunnar has been writing down his observations about the weather and the flowering timepoint for 25 different species of flowers. Not surprisingly, Gunnar is a farmer. Kjell Bolmgren from Swedish University of Aricultural Sciences, says it is useful to turn to some groups in society that already has done some crowdsourcing already. Gunnar´s data ended up in a publication in International Journal of Biometeorology in 2013! 
Kjell also points out that it can be useful to work together with authorities that need the data. He explains; “The crowdsourcing work is no longer dependent on a few dedicated enthusiasts.”
Having a professional communicator in his family, Kjell gets a lot of tips for succeeding with crowdsourcing. People need motivation and a purpose to help scientists gather data (climate change for example). It needs to be convenient and simple for them. Perhaps they can do some sourcing at spots that they pass by every day. They need accurate instructions and some support (perhaps facebook).  
Best tips: Let people follow different protocols to engage on different levels. Let them have ONE focus.

Åke Lindström – Swedish Bird Survey
Swedish Bird Survery (http://www.zoo.ekol.lu.se/birdmonitoring/Eng/index.htm) has been counting birds all over Sweden for 30 years. “We ask a lot from our surveyors. It is so important with the sampling design and data collection”, Åke says. Raise the awareness about the scientific method! How? Popular science writing, lectures, teach at courses, year reports to surveyors, workshops for surveyors, community, project webpage.
Åke sees a drawback with “the old scheme” used in Swedish Bird Survey: people count birds where they live and where it is nice to watch. Therefore new scheme was established in 1996. There are new fixed routes that takes about 6 hours to walk. 716 routes exist in Sweden, and 501 routes were counted in 2013.
Best tips: Make your survey small. There is a remarkable strength of a small survey. An example of this is how we get a good idea of how people will vote in election polls. Surveys done for elections are very small, but give an immense information.

This was just a few of the speakers! Take a look at the Youtube-link to see more.















PHOTO: Still of Richard Ottvall, surveyor.

måndag 12 maj 2014

On the move!

Lars Råberg, Maria Strandh, Helena Westerdahl, Susanne Åkesson, Emily O'Connor, Arne Hegemann, Christina Rengefors, Karin Rengefors.

This Saturday the annual race "Lundaloppet", organized by IFK Lund, took place in the centre of Lund. Lundaloppet has grown increasingly popular and this year 6000 people had signed up. Also CAnMove broke the record by entering 13 keen participants under the slogan We CAn Move..!

The weather conditions was perfect for running – not too hot and sunny – and the atmosphere was enthusiastic and friendly.
Susanne Åkesson and Christina Rengefors who entered the competion for the first time were positively surprised by the enthusiasm around the event.
- It was fun to run! People was cheering along the route and you could hear music playing everywhere.

Christina, Susanne and Astrid

However, perfect running weather isn’t really perfect weather for outdoor lunching, so the planned CAnMove pic-nic for the participants was exchanged for an indoor CAnMove breakfast (for all CAnMovians) that will take place on May 23rd. Look out for the invitation!

Congratulations to all who participated and good luck next year!

Anders Kullberg and Christina
Giuseppe Bianco, Karin Rengefors, Anders Hedenström


//Helena Osvath
PHOTO: Sylvie Tesson

CAnMove goes to Science Communication Forum, Gothenburg

”With hundreds of activities and about 70,000 visits The International Science Festival in Gothenburg is one of Europe’s leading popular science events and the only one of its kind in Sweden.”
 For me, CAnMove´s representative at The International Science Festival in Gothenburg, Thursday afternoon was spent in multiple seminars about science communication. Theme for this years festival was "Act, react, interact".
Many colleagues from Lund University slowly emerged from the mass of 280 people attending. To be truthful, there were two main joys with the get-together. I am sure anyone who has ever gone to a conference can attest to this:
  1. You meet colleagues (that you not normally meet), and you meet new exciting people.
  2. You get a lot of ideas for your own studies or projects

Many discussions revolved around communicators and their eternal dilemma of making strategic plans. Well, can´t really say that CAnMove has that problem.

The best and worst talk
Ray McHug, Head of Media and Corporate Communications, from University of Stratclyde in Glascow, Scotland, was Keynote speaker of the Forum. He talked about how the university used it´s strategic communicaton to make it “the place of useful learning” (that were the words that permeate the whole university). I was lead to believe that this was going to be a talk about how storytelling can help you get a message across, but I was surprised that the storytelling was minimal. Focus was put on prizes that the university had won for being the best university in UK. The best thing about the talk, was that Ray McHug really could show that the university is working together with industry to produce useful things and useful learning.

Many questions remain though; how did his previous tabloid press career help him to manage the communication from Stratclyde? Are there any women there? Should Sweden have similar prizes to conjure up a list of the most entrepreneurial/best research/best reputed universities in our country?

Technology was used to “get a feeling”
The arrangers tried a community-based, Cotunity, tool to measure and get a feeling of peoples thoughts during the forum for communication. There was also a prize for the person among the attendants that commented the most on Cotunity. Funnily, the guy who won, commented that there was an awful lot of communication discussed and very little science. Agree!

The rest of the Science Festival, I did not really attend (duty called elsewhere), but the program was filled with interesting things! Perhaps next year!

/Caroline

Image: International Science Festival

fredag 9 maj 2014

Field film competition

CAnMove have earlier this year announced orally, that we have a film competition for the PhD students and post-docs that are out and about in field this season. Some of you are doing important work in the lab or wind tunnel - film it!

The prize:
The prize is yet a big secret, but we are pretty sure that you are going to like it.
This is what you have to do to compete:
Make a film of about 1 minute on your fieldwork. You can use a smart phone or more sophisticated gear, as long as the content is interesting/fun/exciting…
The best way to ensure great material, is to produce a lot of films and choose a few that you like. You can send as many films as you like to us!
Jury:
We will probably have some kind of web-voting where all of you have a chance to vote for the top-3 films. When voting is over, we will announce the winner later this autumn.
All films sent to CAnMove can be used in the CAnMove blog and on our YouTube-channel to spread information and inspiration about science.
Send your films to:
Caroline.bolmeson@biol.lu.se

Good luck!


Photo: CAnMove