Print PageProject Noah is an award-winning mobile platform and online community focused on wildlife documentation and citizen science. The project was launched in early 2010 as an experiment to see if a fun and engaging location-based mobile application could be developed to encourage the general public to start documenting and discussing local wildlife. Additionally, by connecting a massive network of aspiring citizen scientists from around the world, Project Noah set out to become a powerful new force for ecosystem monitoring and wildlife data collection. We designed and developed new software that incorporated features and functionality from an assortment of popular mobile applications and websites and designed incentives to encourage contribution and activity. We wanted to see if we could encourage the mobile masses to document their encounters with nature and collect some useful data in the process.
Results/Conclusions
With the launch of our new software platform in February of 2011, we quickly passed 100,000 downloads of our mobile applications and registered tens of thousands of users from the around the world. Everyday, we see a growing number of new wildlife photos and an active community collaborating to identify species and learn more about local plants and animals. With over 16,000 wildlife encounters already documented, we have tapped into the mobile masses and are off to a solid start. As we continue to amass more and more data, we are now focusing on developing effective ways to share our collected data with other groups and individuals.
