May19
Did you know that thousands of Americans forage for fruits and vegetables in local parks and plots of undeveloped land. Collectively gathered, their observations could help researchers make detailed studies of changes in plant distribution and behavior.
“Why not take advantage of the fact that people know this kind of information, but don’t necessarily have a way of taking it to scientists?” said Rebecca McClain, a researcher at the nonprofit Institute for Culture and Ecology.
McClain is part of a team that hopes to develop a networked system that allows foragers to submit notes on the plants they see. They have applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the ecological effects of urban and suburban foraging.
Through the help of crowdsourcing, Hundreds of plant species are routinely collected by America’s foragers, a thousands-strong subculture whose members approach their quest for inexpensive, freshly-picked natural produce with the rigor and focus of trained botanists.
A system similar to that envisioned by McClain exists now for amateur birdwatchers, whose sightings are collated in efforts like the Great Backyard Bird Count, eBird, North American Bird Phenology Program and Project Feederwatch. That data has been invaluable in helping ornithologists and conservationists estimate bird population health and behavior.
In the avian case, there simply aren’t enough scientists to count birds. There are similarly too few researchers to keep real-time, on-the-ground track of America’s plants, many of which are being affected by climate change in ways scientists have just started to study. Satellite imaging of vegetation is helpful, but can lack a fine-grained level of detail.
“Foragers pay very close attention to fine-scale processes,” said Marla Emery, a research geographer with the U.S. Forest Service and author of the NSF proposal. “Satellite imagery is getting finer, but in general it misses these processes. And then there’s the frequency with which satellites sample a location. A lot of what’s seen by foragers is quite ephemeral. For something like mushrooms, they might need to return every three days, and devout foragers could be out there on a daily basis. They’re seeing on a very fine spatial and temporal scale.”
According to Emery, a forager data-gathering project would also provide valuable knowledge about the dynamics of areas that tend to be ignored by researchers focused on traditionally natural locales.
“We don’t get this sort of information on urban and suburban ecosystems, but we could,” said Emery.
The system itself would likely be relatively simple, requiring little more than a database architecture into which foragers would submit codified reports on the status and location of plants.
“In the past, part of the problem with this has been being unable to pinpoint where observations are coming from,” said McLain. “But with GPS technology, especially since it’s now being built into cellphones, everyone’s got it at their fingertips.”
The benefits of the program would be more than scientific, said Allaire Diamond, a graduate student in the University of Vermont’s Field Naturalist program who would handle the forager data system’s technical infrastructure.
She envisions a beta version targeted at expert foragers and a later program that would help amateurs identify plants in the field, perhaps using a plant-recognizing iPhone program connected to and ethnobotanical database.
“Ultimately we’re trying to connect to the land and use a piece of technology to do it,” said Diamond. “It’d be neat to replace the idea that things like iPhones and the internet are going to conflict with being in nature.”
