The good natured podcast comes to you from conservation optimism and its founding partners, Synchronicity, Earth and the University of Oxford.
Welcome to Good-Natured, a podcast where you can join us for uplifting chats that shine a light on conservation challenges.
In each episode, we interview an inspiring conservationist.
A fascinating guest come from many backgrounds, artists, scientists, activists and many more.
I'm Sophia APHC student focussing on marine conservation. I love doing science and telling stories through film writing, improvised comedy.
And now. And I'm Julia, a science communicator and journalist.
I'm passionate about sharing what people are doing to make the world a better place. Hey, Sophia.
Hi, Julia. Today, I'm really thrilled to let you know that we are having Meredith Palmer on the podcast.
Meredith is a researcher at the Pringle Lab at Princeton University.
And a lot of the research she does is about predator prey interaction.
So she look at how predators change prey behaviour.
She looks at stuff like demography, the impact of coexistence and ecosystem functioning and lots of different aspects of these interactions.
Meredith is also an expert in citizen science.
So basically working with people who don't have formal scientific training to conduct scientific research by processing photos from her camera traps,
which she puts out in the Serengeti in order to record lots of exciting animals like zebras and lions and civets.
And if you've never heard of citizen science, Meredith is going to give us a bit of an explanation of what it means.
But what you need to know is that she has various projects that you can actually take part in.
And so one of these projects is the Snapshot Serengeti. Another one is called Snapshot Safari.
So if you tie these projects online, you'll find all the information and how you can join.
And Meredith Walk is very interesting because it's this balance between doing a lot of tech.
So, for example, making these cameras work and collaborating with partners in the tech sector such as Google,
Deep Mind, Microsoft, Phreak Labs, Wildlands and others.
But then the other thing that she does is actually empowering people and working with
people who come from all sorts of backgrounds in order to do this conservation work.
Meredith is already passionate about outreach and science communication.
And she also cares a lot about growing the next generation of scientists, including women and other underrepresented groups.
So she's going to tell us a little bit about why that is so important to her.
And some of the work that she's doing to make sure that comes to the fore and happens.
I can't wait to hear a little bit more about that aspect, because as a science communicator, I always love when scientists do outreach.
And if you know us already, you know that conservation optimism, we believe that everyone can be a conservationist.
So let's hear what Meredith has to say about all these different exciting projects.
Hi, murda. Thank you so much for joining us today.
We're really excited to hear about all the work that you're doing to help us.
Question is quite a general one, really. Why do you think that it's good or important or useful for people who don't have
formal scientific training to participate in scientific research to citizens?
Science is, of course, a way for people. No matter what your background, no matter what your expertise,
no matter what kind of training you've had to partake in real, meaningful, authentic science and research.
So there's a whole bunch of scientists out there. We are.
Many of us are completely inundated with data as part of the technological revolution, especially that's happened over the last decade.
Researchers are now collecting far more data than know a single researcher or a single research team can process on our own.
And so we often turn to the general public.
We start crowdsourcing the processing of this data so that we can quickly go from a camera trap image or a satellite image or an audio recording.
Turn nine to the numbers that we can crunch in order to do our research on our conservation.
And a big component of this. This is science for me isn't just using citizen scientists as a machine.
That is part of it. And it's a part we're extremely grateful for and excited about as scientists.
But like you said, it's also a really cool way to bring people who might not have experience with science into science.
And I think it's been particularly powerful during the lockdown because people
were stuck at home and they were looking for something meaningful to do.
And I know that we work quite closely with Penguin Watch and they have this citizen science part of it,
where people can look at photos and say if they see penguins.
And I know that it's really Budarin looked down because people really want it to be doing something definitely and in lockdown.
You know, we're feeling listless. We can't travel. We can't go out and see things.
We can't go into nature. Like you said, a lot of people might feel like they don't have a sense of purpose.
And you can essentially go on a I call an armchair safari.
Like all you need to participate in my kind of citizen science is you a computer or a phone.
You go to our website, you download our app, and all of a sudden you're in Africa looking at cheetahs and lions from the comfort of your own home.
And at the same time, you are doing incredibly important work,
work that allows us to do kinds of research and conservation that simply is not possible without the help of citizen scientists.
It sounds like there are just so many opportunities, like you say,
both for the people who are participating and being citizen scientists, but then also for the researchers.
So I'm curious,
what made you decide to use citizen science in your research and what was some of the challenges that you found in making that project work?
So our projects, I think, are very exciting because we were sort of at the forefront of using online citizen science to help process data.
So I work with a project called Snapshot Serengeti,
and we started out over 10 years ago with a large scale camera trapping project set up in the middle of Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.
And it's this beautiful, pristine ecosystem.
So we go out and we have 200 camera traps and they're triggered by heat and motion to take pictures of passing wildlife.
So they're running 24 hours a day taking pictures of anything that comes in front of them.
Like I said, we've had this one camera trap grid out in the field for 10 years now.
That's tens of millions of photographs.
But, you know, we're quite literally drowning in wildlife pictures, which is amazing because it gives us this really fine scale,
high resolution look at what entire communities are of animals are doing in this ecosystem.
But we can't analyse a photograph directly.
And so I once calculated I did this calculation if I was to take a year's worth
of data collected from this one camera tracker in Serengeti National Park.
And I had to sit down and process all of that data myself and say it takes, you know,
like 10 to 20 seconds for me to look at each picture and write down what's in it.
And if I'm working eight hours a day and if I'm working seven days a week.
So no weekends, 52 weeks a year. So no sick days, no holidays, no time off.
It would take me something like seven or eight years to process a single year's worth of camera trap data.
So many of our research teams are just, you know, a couple of scientists, a handful of researchers.
We don't have the capacity to do that ourselves.
And another very important driving factor of this kind of data collection is that we use this data for conservation.
We use this data to evaluate. What happens? We put up a fence or increase our anti poaching or reintroduce a predator.
How does the system change? What do we need to do to protect this community? And if I'm not getting that data back.
You know, until several years later, I can't react and respond and adapt and to do conservation effectively.
And so we turned to a platform called the Zooniverse.
And the Zooniverse had just done this really amazing thing with images from the Hubble Space Telescope.
So they had a project called Galaxy Zoo where they took images from the Hubble Space Telescope.
And there's some things that the human brain just does really, really well.
So image pattern recognition is something that, you know, our brains have evolved for millennia to be amazingly good at.
But computers and things like that aren't super good at that yet.
So Galaxy Zoo took all these images from the Hubble Space Telescope and put them on line and asked people to just identify galaxies.
And this was really the first online citizen science project where we were crowdsourcing image data to people on the Internet.
And it was a massively huge success. We created this project called Snapshot Serengeti.
We put a year and a half's worth of image data online and ecorp processed in three days.
So now we have camera tracking grids, not just in the Serengeti. But we have them in Mozambique.
We have them in South Africa. We get them in some way. We have them in Botswana.
We have them in North America. Been able to scale up this effort, which is producing exponentially more camera trap pictures.
But again, with the help of citizen scientists,
we're actually able to process those images at a pace rapid enough for us to to get used that data in research and conservation.
Are you able to share with us some of the exciting findings that you've unveiled in these different locations through citizen science?
So our Serengeti project, we've had a lot of really great papers come out.
So as a as a scientist, like the scientist, part of me studies predator prey interactions.
And so we've been able to do some really fascinating work looking at how prey animals navigate a landscape in order to avoid predators.
And this may sound like a very simple question, but if you think about it, we're studying an incredibly complex system.
And without the camera traps, I wouldn't be able to study where hundreds of zebra go.
I wouldn't be able to study what lions do at night.
For the most part, researchers don't go out into the Serengeti at night and would be eaten by hippopotamus.
You know, like we don't know what goes on at night. Camera traps have revealed a lot of nocturnal behaviour that was previously unknown.
We had a study that was actually this is my favourite study that's come out of our Serengeti project.
And this was a discovery made by citizen scientists.
So we had some citizen scientists flagged this really, really weird behaviour in some of our nocturnal camera traps data.
They were looking at pictures, giraffe at night and noticing that there were these weird things hanging out on the bottom of the giraffe.
We discovered that there's this species of bird that rather than going to go nest in a tree like a normal bird would do at night,
they would instead roost in the armpits of giraffe.
Would have thought to even look for. No one goes out into the field at night.
The most dangerous time, you know, poking around under Drath, looking for bird.
That sounds amazing, so many different projects and so many interesting species as well.
That must be really interesting for all the different citizen scientists to do that.
It was really important for you to show that everyone can be a scientist.
And I've seen on your website that your heavily invested in growing the next generation of women and underrepresented groups in STEM.
Could you tell us a bit more about the aspects of your work and why it's important to you?
That's such a great question. Thank you for highlighting that, because it's something that's very important to me and my philosophy of doing science.
I'm a woman. I have purple hair and tattoos, and I am a doctor and I am a scientist and I do conservation.
And if I can be a scientist, you can be a scientist. And I think there's really two or three ways that I work.
Two, to grow the next generation of scientists. We do a lot of work in Africa.
So I'm incredibly privileged and grateful to be able to go to Africa and conduct
research and help support African scientists in the incredible work that they're doing.
And so some of what I do when I'm in the field is not just running around checking camera traps and changing batteries and getting SD cards,
but working with local scientists, working with local students, doing training exercises and workshops,
trying to make sure that the continuity of these research and conservation projects is in good hands.
These people on the ground are the ones. This is their wildlife. It's their backyard.
They're deal with the causes and consequences of conservation and for conservation efforts to work.
I think we need to do a much better job. We may be speaking to all of the Western scientists out there of making conservation
a collaborative effort so that capacity building is incredibly important to me.
And it's ultimately our goal to hand over the ownership and the running of all of these camera trapping grids to local scientists,
because they're the ones who need this data to make change in their ecosystems.
As a woman in science, I'm very passionate both about bringing more women and more diverse voices into science
and also making science a supportive place for those people once they get here.
I don't know about either of your experiences as women in science, but it's not as easy as it should be.
I'm not saying that it should be easy, but I think there are a lot of barriers faced by women and other minority groups in STEM.
I mean, honestly, like, I'd never had a dream to be anything other than a scientist,
but I couldn't have done it without the support of other women in STEM.
And I think it's really important for us to build each other up as women, as in STEM and support each other.
And as I mentor a number of women, graduate students, undergraduate students,
I think we need to show the world essentially that women are an important and integral part of science.
So it's not just women doing science, but also women talking about science and speaking to the public and being a face for the work that we do.
The citizen science platform is not only a way for me to show other women and girls that they too can be a scientist just like me.
But it's also a good way for people who might not have the opportunity or the
privilege to engage in scientific experiences to get some science experiences.
I think that makes a lot of sense.
I mean, I'm glad you raise these issues about being inclusive and about creating opportunities for science to be available,
something that's a lot of different people can participate in. What makes you optimistic about the future of nature?
Honestly, it's the passion of the citizen scientists.
I feel that when I was doing strict ecology in the field, watching forests get chopped down and my study animals go extinct by incredibly depressing,
it's hard and it wears you down and it's hard to find those little sparks of optimism.
And one thing about working with citizen scientists is that they have that optimism.
They are so excited and so keen. These are people who are dedicating their own time.
You know, they could be doing anything with that.
You know, half hour that they spend looking at your camera trap photos and instead they're doing conservation work freely of their own incentive.
And I get to interact with those people. I get to talk to them on social media and through our message boards and in person.
And they are just so enthusiastic and so keen and so passionate about what they're doing and what we're doing.
And it just brings you back to life as a conservation scientist,
seeing how many people out there actually do have hope and are willing to take it into their own hands to try and make a difference.
It is amazing. See how many people are doing it.
I've been on Zooniverse and there's lots and lots and lots of projects and they all find volunteers to do them.
So it must be this incredible number of people overall doing citizen science of some sort.
It's it's really amazing. Another wonderful thing about citizen science and something for everyone.
There is projects where you can transcribe civil war diaries or old ships logs or where you can helpful.
Genes. Or figure out how malaria works. So much going on, it's really impressive.
And I think we've got one more question for you.
I have a feeling it might be a difficult one, because you've already mentioned lots of different species.
But if you could make a case for only one species to save.
What would it be and why? Oh, I've been dreading this question.
To be honest, it's such a different way of thinking from how I approach conservation.
I've been privileged to work with many fascinating animals.
I've worked with everything from fish and frogs, monkeys and lions.
But really, when I'm doing conservation, I'm thinking about wildlife communities.
I'm interested in all of the relationships between species. And this is such a cop out answer.
But it doesn't really matter to me if the predator is a lion or a tiger.
I'm just interested in how that big cat interacts with whatever its lunges.
I think that's fair enough. We will accept the answer. Wonderful.
Thank you so much. It is such a pleasure to talk to you. No. Thank you so much.
And actually, we've got a very nice voice. Notes from Sue show.
He's eight and Ruben, who is 10, and they've been participating in the Wild Time gringo's for about half a year.
Take a listen to what they had to say about it. Hi.
I like being a certain time based on wall cam Glasgow set because we get to learn all about animals and identify them.
Catch my breath. And I've also seen since scientists.
And the reason why I really like you is because it gives us something to do well.
Well, we're in the Functionalism. Me and my family. I love identifying animals for wild Cambourne goes in.
We feel like it brings us together. Such an interesting answer to that last question.
I've really been thinking about whether we can change that question or update it in some
way to be more inclusive of the different types of conservation that people are doing.
For sure. I think we've had various people now struggling or saying that they think they might be cheating on that question.
So I think it might be time for an update. So if you have any suggestions on how we could update this specific question, please reach out to us.
We'd love to hear from you. And you can find us at conservation optimism on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
We'd love to hear from you. I felt like Merideth raised such a range of interesting points.
A lot of them around inclusive city and conservation and just thinking about how different people can participate in the
scientific process and how citizen science can allow people to do that potentially when they wouldn't have been able to before.
And I think it's also really rewarding, actually, for people who take part in citizen science,
because you can make really interesting discoveries like the one that she mentioned about these bird living under giraffes, armpits.
It's things that you might not imagine.
And and yet your, you know, annual so far looking at these photos and being like there's something a bit odd here.
The other thing to think about is that amateur science used to be much more of a thing.
You definitely didn't need to have scientific training in order to collect data that's relevant.
I mean, for example, that was Henry David Thoreau, who was a writer who lived on Walden Pond.
And I remember going to Walden Pond and actually then reading some top scientific
papers where they had taken all of his notes about when things flowered.
And now that's been used to understand changes in phonology.
So the way that plants are responding to different seasons and cues potentially in response to climate change.
And he didn't have scientific training.
And then also most women in history who were interested in science or wanted to do science didn't actually have access to scientific training.
So people who ended up contributing a lot to science, for example, Mary Anning,
who collected a lot of amazing fossils, she collected the first Polizia saw.
She had very little education at all at the moment, like a normal kind of day and age.
Science is seen as something that you do. Having had like a very strict educational path.
But that hasn't always been the case. And actually,
a lot of really amazing discoveries and specimens and data have come from people who didn't have that
sort of training and who were just interested in the natural world and the things that they were seeing.
And they went out and just collected that. That's amazing.
And I think that's one one aspect of citizen science that I really love about how it's empowering everyone to just be a conservationist.
And we were giving a tour of the Natural History Museum at Oxford recently.
So conservation optimism tool, he can fight it on YouTube if you want.
And as part of this tool, we were showing a specimen that they have that has been collected by a little girl who was,
I think, like less than 10 years old. And just on that species that hadn't been recorded in Oxfordshire for absolutely
ages and just brought it to the museum with her parents to see what what it was.
And then it was just very surprising. So, as you said, these discoveries as well by people who are not trained scientists keep happening.
And I think that link to something that we've not yet mentioned in this episode. But citizen science is not just an online thing.
So in this case, the project that we talked about, our online citizen science.
But you can also be an on the ground citizen scientists, for example,
every year you can look at in your garden and say the species that you've recorded or there are some campaigns to look at butterfly species.
And, you know, you can use apps or sometimes you just go on a Web site.
And it's another really good way if you want to, you know, get muddy and have a bit more of the on the ground experience.
That's another way as well that you can get involved with citizen science. Absolutely.
I have walked on citizen science projects in the past,
and it's pretty cool to see how people can be so passionate and just kind of like show up and get involved in data collection.
It's interesting, though, to think about how in this pandemic, I think it's just changed so many of the ways that we do things.
And citizen science and in particular this project seems to just have been so well poised for
this moment to take advantage of the way that people are sitting at home and can contribute.
Hundred percent. We've been told that the project,
the number of people doing citizen science for the specific projects that made this work on tripled during the lockdown.
So we've seen these massive booms of people using it more and more.
And I think it's just because, as you said, we are discovering all these different ways to do things virtual is becoming more common.
And so now you're like, well, if I am to sit on the sofa because I can't really go out, then I might as well look at photos of.
Animals and plants and just be useful for these research projects.
I think it's wonderful that people without leaving their house at all can actually have a positive impact in terms of conservation research.
I mean, I think in a moment when so many of us have felt so frustrated and maybe like hemmed in in a
bunch of ways to actually still be able to have these impacts and to do science is so cool.
Well, on that note, Sophia, I think that's it for this episode.
And if you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcast and Spotify.
This episode was funded by an E. S r c impact exploration account Ground through the Investor of Oxford.
Original theme music composed and produced by Matthew.