Have you ever visited a beach and wondered where the waves carry all that sand? On a college camping trip, curiously about waves and sand sparked Rob Thieler´s desire to study shorelines around the
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. Thirthy years later and now a U.S. Geological Survey research geologist, Thieler is combining science and smartphone
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to help study s threatened bird, the Atlantic Coast piping plover.
The piping
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is an iconic shorebird that breeds along the Atlantic Coast, the Great
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and Great Plains. Rising sea levels and storm surges associated with climate change, as well as increased development in their beach
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, threaten the species. To help track changes in piping plover habitat, Thieler developed a free app called
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.
In 2012, Thieler - who never thought that as a scientist he would build a smartphone app - decided to make an app with his work colleagues to collect habitat data along a long stretch of the Atlantic coast. This is a marked change from the typical way scientists collect data, which involves gathering
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using specialized equipment or writing in notebooks and then
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into spreadsheets. "As a scientist, I enjoy studying the interactions between people, animals like plovers, and their environment" says Thieler. "As a federal civil servant, I´m working to apply science to help solve problems, wheter it´s natural or cultural resources or human safety".
Since releasing iPlover, scientists have gathered data across
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of breeding range. That equals about a third of the distance across the U.S. which is a large area to cover for only two thousand breeding pairs of piping plovers on the east coast. Instead of having to travel and spend days at each site, a network of collaborators in the field use the app to collect and send
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, allowing scientists to gather data more efficiently. It also allows them to collect data at the same time during each breeding season, providing a better picture of changes that happen over longer periods of time. And fast, centralized access means scientists can look at data quickly to get a real-time idea of where and how piping plovers are using
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habitat.
While iPlover is used by
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, other apps like the U.S. Geological Survey´s web based "Coast -Did the Coast Change?" use crowdsourcing, inviting citizen scientists to identify coastal changes by comparing birdseye-view
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taken before and after storms. All the information scientists and citizen scientists alike collect helps federal and state agencies create policy plans for addresing climate change impacts worldwide.