Get Involved

What's blooming on the citizen science front

Key topics in this category:

RECENT POSTS

November 16, 2011 | 12:58 PM | By

A Year-Long Sky Journal as Video Mosaic

A motion mosaic of our ever-changing, endlessly fascinating atmosphere

Ken Murphy / Murphlab

Detail from Ken Murphy's video sky mosaic

About two years ago, Ken Murphy set up a tripod on the roof of San Francisco’s Exploratorium science museum and aimed his video camera at a particular patch of sky. He’s spent the two years since shooting time-lapse sequences from his makeshift observatory and has stitched them together into this wonderful visual tableau.

Murphy, who is a web developer at KQED and a former artist-in-residence at the Exploratorium, says the project grew out of — well — boredom. He became restless with his experimentation with art works using LED lights. He says he was looking for more natural movement. So Murphy went dumpster-diving for parts and cobbled together a computer-controlled camera that would record the same sky segment every ten seconds, around the clock. He says it took two years of shooting to stitch together one full year of images. Eventually he found himself sorting through three million video frames for the mosaic. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Get Involved, atmosphere, weather
October 17, 2011 | 8:23 PM | By

Pacific Islanders Dance for Sea Rise Awareness

“Just for you to hear our voices…This is our only hope.”

Traditional dancers from Kiribati, which is threatened by the rising Pacific

In Pacific island cultures, dance can be a form of prayer — which may be why three dozen people from the disappearing coral atolls of Tuvalu, Kiribati and Tokelau are on a fourteen-city US tour with what they see as their futures at stake.

The message: that what we in the United States do here, affects them there. It’s a performance and educational campaign called “Water Is Rising.”

Instead of looking at bar graphs, we heard the beat of sticks on large biscuit tins. No Power Point here, just artfully synchronized hands and hips, fingers and bare feet. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Get Involved
September 29, 2011 | 10:00 PM | By

Blame My Driving Habits on that Parking Spot

Being the true confessions of a solo driver in L.A.

Hear Krissy Clark’s companion radio feature from The California Report.

Craig Miller

Afternoon rush hour with a mostly-empty HOV lane

I’m a Bay Area native who has about evenly divided my adult life between San Francisco and Los Angeles. So, I have a schizophrenic relationship to driving. Which is to say, I have the same kind of relationship that California as a whole has to driving.

Here’s what I’ve learned during my intra-state sojourns: my transportation habits have very little to do with how environmentally conscious I am as a person, and have a lot to do with parking spots.

When I lived in San Francisco, my daily life was 90% car-free. I owned a car but aside from moving it on street sweeping days (or trying to remember to), I barely thought about the thing unless I was leaving for a weekend trip. My bike, my feet, the bus, BART and the transbay ferries were my chariots. Some of it had to do with the city’s human-scaled streets and efficient public transit. But mostly, it was just too damn time-consuming–or expensive–to find a parking spot most of the places I wanted to go. I couldn’t be bothered to drive. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Get Involved, M2G, Transportation, Urban Planning
September 27, 2011 | 6:18 PM | By

Snapping Snakes for Science — with your iPhone

An innovative citizen science project gains momentum, sprouts new branches

Tad Arensmeier/Flickr

Tad Arensmeier photographed this Yellow-Blotched Palm-Pitviper for iNaturalist.

The organizers of a new effort to catalog the world’s reptiles want to enlist you and your iPhone for their cause. The Global Reptile Bioblitz launched last month and aims to collect amateur observations of every species of reptile on Earth — all 9,413 of them. The project is the sister effort of the Global Amphibian Bioblitz which launched earlier this summer and, thanks to submissions from citizen scientists around the world, has already collected photos of more than 700 of the nearly 7,000 known amphibian species on the planet.

The observations are all logged at iNaturalist.org, an online citizen science community with more than 2,000 members who’ve cumulatively logged more than 30,000 field observations of species ranging from redwoods to coyotes.Observations can be uploaded to the site directly, or through an iPhone app, also called iNaturalist, which was launched earlier this year. Since we first reported on it back in January, the app has been downloaded more than 3,000 times, according to its developer Ken-ichi Ueda. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Get Involved, The Science, Biodiversity, Citizen Science, iNaturalist, species
September 24, 2011 | 8:16 PM | By

A Climate Convergence in San Francisco

Organizers call San Francisco “flagship” event for worldwide campaign

Moving Planet rally crowd

Christopher Penalosa / KQED

More than a thousand people marched down Market Street in San Francisco for the Moving Planet rally.

About a thousand people marched in San Francisco on Saturday, chanting slogans, carrying signs and wearing costumes. But unlike many demonstrations that frequent the City by the Bay, the Moving Planet rally was one of hundreds around the world, calling for action and awareness to halt global climate change.

Organized by 350.org, the non-profit founded by author and activist Bill McKibben, the San Francisco rally brought together some predictable allies, such as the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Berkeley-based Ecology Center, but it also included groups with broader aims, such as the National Organization for Women, Food Not Bombs and 100,000 Poets for Peace. McKibben’s group is devoted to reducing carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere to 350 parts per million (from the current 390 ppm), a number that some scientists estimate could stave off catastrophic effects of climate change. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Get Involved, activism, Moving Planet
September 8, 2011 | 3:25 PM | By

Bill McKibben: On the Front Lines of the Climate Fight

Author and climate activist Bill McKibben says that if we want to put the brakes on global warming, it’s time to put our bodies on the line.

(Photo: Nancie Battaglia)

Today McKibben dropped by KQED for a discussion on Forum with entrepreneur and fellow environmentalist Paul Hawken about the fight for a coherent national climate policy.  McKibben is the founder of the environmental group 350.org and was among the hundreds of people arrested near the White House last week during a protest over a controversial oil pipeline that has been proposed to run from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

Afterward, I sat down with McKibben and asked him about the role of civil disobedience in the fight against climate change. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Get Involved, Government & Business, activism, Oil
July 27, 2011 | 5:03 PM | By

Support for Climate Policy High in California

Craig Miller

Three-quarters of Californians believe climate change is a serious threat to the state’s economy. And a majority thinks we need to act now to reduce emissions, rather than wait until the economy improves. These are among the findings of a new survey by the Public Policy Institute of California

“Californians really believe that in our state there’s an opportunity to have a better environment and a better economy through addressing climate change,” concludes Mark Baldassare, who directed the survey and says Californians believe — by a two-to-one margin — that climate change policies, like requiring more renewable energy, will create jobs.

The survey also finds overwhelming bipartisan support for requirements mandating more fuel efficient cars (81%), “greener” buildings and appliances (74%), requiring utilities to increase renewable energy sources (82%), and for requiring industry to reduce emissions (82%). Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Get Involved, Government & Business, cap and trade, carbon tax, renewable energy
June 8, 2011 | 9:54 AM | By

Visualizing California Climate Change

An engrossing one-stop shop for California’s climate future goes online

If you’re like me, and you spend a good part of every day thinking about climate change and California, you may have already lost yourself in the treasure trove of climate data and mapping fun that is Cal-Adapt, a comprehensive series of online tools just released by  the California Natural Resources Agency and the California Energy Commission.

And if you’re not like me, it’s still worth checking out.

Built by UC Berkeley’s Geospatial Innovation Facility, Cal-Adapt is designed to aid local and regional planners in preparing to adapt to climate change by providing scientific data from institutions like Scripps Institute of Oceanography, U.S. Geological Survey, UC Merced, and the Pacific Institute, and integrating it with mapping and charting capabilities from Google. The result is an attractive, interactive experience that enables you to view potential future climate-related scenarios for any location in California, and to sort by topics such as sea level rise, wildfire, and snowpack.  Importantly, data sources are prominently displayed. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Get Involved, Government & Business, The Science, adaptation, multimedia, Science, Urban Planning
May 12, 2011 | 7:01 PM | By

High Marks but Few Takers on California Transit

So…if Bay Area transit is so good, why don’t more people use it?

(Photo: Craig Miller)

A new study from the Brookings Institution finds that compared with the rest of the nation, the Bay Area offers pretty good public transportation options.

Among 100 major metropolitan areas, San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont ranks 16th, and San Jose-Santa Clara-Sunnyvale ranks second.  Areas were ranked according to how accessible transit is to riders, how long it takes to get to work on transit and how often the systems run during rush hours.

So…if Bay Area transit is so good, why doesn’t anybody seem to take it?

Just one out of ten people in the Bay Area commute by public transportation, according to John Goodwin of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. He says that number hasn’t changed much over the years, despite huge investments in the system. And the Bay Area isn’t alone in that. A recent study by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) found that between 1990 and 2008, the share of commuters taking transit increased by less than one percentage point, from 5% to 5.5%, despite the construction of 217 new rail stations, and the fact that more than a third of California’s transportation spending since the early 1980s has gone to public transit.
Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Get Involved, Government & Business, growth, M2G, public transportation, transit
May 9, 2011 | 7:44 AM | By

Climate: The Next Generation

What do they want? Climate Justice! When do they want it? You guessed it.

Young activists are taking to the streets to call for immediate action against climate change.

Young people rallied for climate action on Mothers' Day in San Francisco and ten other California cities and towns. (Photo: Chris Penalosa)

Youth turned out in eleven cities across California over the weekend in a series of coordinated demonstrations.

Dubbed the i-Matter marches, youth from Eureka to San Diego and from grammar school to college, demanded “climate justice” for their generation. The marches follow a recent lawsuit filed by young people against the Federal government and all 50 states, to force more aggressive reductions of greenhouse gases. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Get Involved, activism, iMatter, youth