CAnMove Newsletter Autumn 2014

CAnMove Newsletter Autumn 2014

 

Swedish Research Council Evaluation

June 16^th, the decision by Swedish Research Council (VR) was communicated, CAnMove and most other Linnaeus programs funded 2008 receive continued level of funding. It was a time to celebrate and to continue our plans for the coming period! There were some limited changes, and interestingly enough there were both cut-downs and increased funding within our evaluation group in Natural Sciences. CAnMove are grateful for the positive evaluation, continued support and look forward to future program activities. The complete report is available for down-loading at VR home page.

All in all, the Linnaeus centers show well-functioning organization and many produce world-leading research. CAnMove is certainly one of them, and we can be proud of our achievements. The panel wrote: "CAnMove has undertaken excellent and innovative research, making use of modern technological developments to fundamentally advance the field." It was further high-lighted for our centre that we have excellent outreach performance, and have started several new infrastructure initiatives. The outreach activities is continuing with the recently funded E-book project involving CAnMove PhD students. We further were advised to look into recruiting modelling expertise, to approach the industry, and to re-allocate funding to stimulate research projects in focus areas involving graduate students. There are many possibilities and by recent developments and initiatives within the CAnMove program, we foresee a bright future and hopefully a long establishment of the CAnMove centre and its research activities at Lund University. An exciting autumn and winter is coming up where we will be able to explore results from successful field campaigns and new infrastructures tested in the field.

 

Book Project

A more than two year long journey for us all with the book “Animal Movement Across Scales” is now over as the corrected proofs of all chapters are now handed in to Oxford University Press and the process is now in their hands. We can be proud of managing to perform this gigantic task according to plan, which should mean that the book will be on the shelf in September.

So, thanks for all your efforts and let us hope the book will serve as inspiration for others and kick off new and creative research!

 

Field work continues into the autumn
The Swedish summer has been warm and productive for most of the CAnMove researchers. Several PI:s, PhD students and post-docs have been working through the summer. The autumn migration is in full action leading to field campaigns lasting still some more months.

 

Technical Lab Q1 report

Microloggers
The micro-logger is currently under development and getting lighter and thinner than ever before. With battery, it currently weigh about 1 gram. This 4^th version has a light sensor, as well as other new features. The hardware was successfully finished for the field campaign this summer and was used in several research projects. The new device will be able to distinguish between birds´ constant rest, constant flight and other behavior that is not resting nor flying. Over 50 loggers are currently being placed on birds in the field.

The database is under development
A production database (PD) – hosted by LDC – is in place. The data model for tracking radar is ready

and data from Falsterbo has been loaded. The loading of data from Lund and Abisko is awaiting the scrutiny of data. The data models for light logger data and satellite telemetry were almost ready but
the decision was taken to start over with a more general, flexible data model for both types of data.
This model is expected to also cope with all kinds of data loggers and all combinations of sensors on them. The work to build a test web service for data transfer to WRAM has commenced.
A presentation on the CAnMove database work was held at the end of February. An interview round
with all stakeholders is about halfway through.

 

 

New symposias planned in 2015

Local biosensor-meeting

International symposium: Animal modelling bridging the gap between modelling and tracking data

 

The CAnMove E-book project received funding from the Sten K Johnson Foundation

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 received 150.000 SEK at a ceremony the 17 of June at the Sten K Johnson Center at School of Economics and Management Lund University in June. We are of course honored and excited! The production of the book has now started with engagement from the young research community of CAnMove.


Film competition

The prize: A high-definition action camera GoPro Hero, latest model is 4, and is out this summer. The GoPro has amazing HD-image quality and comes with a ton of features. Basically, you go on a real ride with the camera strapped to your helmet/body, film/photograph your adventure and share it immediately to social medias.

This is what you have to do to compete: Make a film of about 1 minute of your fieldwork. You can use a smart phone or more sophisticated gear, as long as the content is interesting/fun/exciting…There is a possibility to borrow a small Panasonic Full HD-camera from Christina Rengefors´ office (3rd floor, room B364).

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! We encourage you not to feel pressured into doing something too ambitious. Have faith that your films are good enough.

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

 

Citizen and Science Workshop 24 of April - recap

Crowdsourcing data from happy amateur scientists is not new, but develops very fast right now thanks to tools (smartphones, internet, etc.) and virtual communities.

The 1-day international workshop: Åke Lindström, PI in CAnMove, 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:

www.youtube.com/user/BiodivLU

There was so much useful information for scientists aspiring to crowd source data, during this workshop. Therefore, we have compiled tips from a few of the speakers here.

 

Jonathan Silverman works with iSpot, which is a site and tool online. 150 organizations 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. 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. 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 Agricultural Sciences

For 73 years, Gunnar has been writing his observations about the weather and the flowering time point for 25 different species of flowers. Not surprisingly, Gunnar is a farmer. Kjell Bolmgren from Swedish University of Agricultural 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.

 

Equality Workshop

Achieving equality: What it takes to understand and manage diversity

Friday 4 of April, CAnMove organized a workshop on equality. About 30 curious CAnMove members (and a few from other departments) spent the afternoon thinking about and discussing this important but potentially complicated concept. We were guided by Kerstin Fritsches and Stephen Evill from PostDocTraining.

 

During the workshop we touched upon the many different aspects of the social environment that can affect equality in a research environment such as CAnMove: leadership, how the things we say and write are perceived by others, understanding and accepting the different personalities we have around us, dealing with cultural differences, and giving as well as receiving feed-back. Lectures were mixed with small exercises in an inspiring and relaxed way. 

The participants could test whether they are practical or creative personalities and we got the flavour of how it would be to work in a super-feminine cultural environment or, at the other extreme, a high-power distance culture with an all-mighty leader. No doubt there are many exciting aspects to dive into as far as equality is concerned and how a research environment will reach its full potential. There are definitely themes for more equality workshops. The workshop and afternoon ended with a nice buffet.

Linneaus meeting in Strömstad

In the beginning of April (9-11), a group of CAnMovians visited Strömstad for a joint meeting with one of sister Linnaeus Centre’s from Gothenburg University, The Linnaeus Centre for Marine Evolutionary Biology (CeMEB). Invited to the meeting was also the "Butterfly Group" from Stockholm University.

Between Wednesday and Friday we could enjoy both a poster session and exiting lectures with extremely diverse themes. For example, the participants learned more about Insect life cycle genomics and Diapause, local adaptation in marine snails and aerodynamic performance in flying birds.

The participants also got to experience a guided boat trip to the beautiful Koster archipelago. We thank CeMEB for the hospitality and a very nice arrangement. We also hope that we will eventually have the opportunity to invite them to Lund!