COASST – It Takes a Village

Julia K. Parrish is being honored as a Champion of Change for her dedication to increasing public engagement in science and science literacy.

In 1991, the freighter Tuo Hai collided with the Tenyo Maru, a fishing vessel plying the cold, rich waters just off the southern coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.  The ensuing oil spill smeared down the pristine outer coast of Washington State, coating beaches in Olympic National Park as well as lands belonging to the Makah, Quileute, Quinault, and Hoh Tribal Nations.  At the time, I was a “fledgling scientist” who happened to be working on Tatoosh Island, a rocky outcrop standing sentinel to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, entry point to Seattle and Vancouver, Puget Sound and the Salish Sea.  It was a warm, foggy day, and the sea was calm.  I stood on the rocks, listening to the sound of wings slapping water as oil-soaked birds literally rowed to shore.  Their fate was sealed—and in a very different way, mine was too.

When a disaster happens in our coastal waters, how do we measure its impact?  How do we know what is normal, what is right?  And more to the point, how do we prove it?  In the world of professional science, we will never have enough people, time, or dollars to get the job done – to completely know every part of the natural world, or how healthy, or broken, our ecosystems are.  The world is too large, and we are too few.  Simply put, scientists need help.

The Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST) was born out of the Tenyo Maru oil spill, out of the realization that scientists alone can’t begin to document what’s normal, let alone how fast things are changing.  We need a willing army to make that happen.  In short, we need citizens – the locals who watch, and know, and love their backyards, their environment.

In COASST, hundreds of citizens, from California to Alaska, work together with university and agency scientists to document coastal ocean health.  And we do that by monitoring the number and type of birds washing up on the tide.  Yup.  Dead birds.  What’s more, COASSTers collect evidence on every bird they find – what kind of foot; precise measurements of the beak, wing, and leg; carefully arranged photographs – allowing them, and independent experts, to use scientific deduction to correctly identify each bird to species.   COASSTers get it right 85% of the time – and we can prove it.  That makes COASST data immediately usable in science and resource management, and in a court of law. 

Does COASST make a difference? Working with oceanographers and marine biologists, our volunteers documented the largest die-off of seabirds (over 8,000) due to a harmful algal bloom anywhere in the world, ever.  That information assisted the Washington Wildlife Commission in setting duck hunting limits for bloom-affected species.  Our data have also established critical baselines for other sources of mortality, from oil spills to changing climate.

And here’s the thing – if almost a thousand people are willing to survey their coastline for beachcast birds every month, some of them driving and hiking for hours to get there, all of them relegated to the weather the weekend throws at them, just imagine how many thousands of people we could engage in, let’s just say, slightly less smelly pursuits.

They may be geeky, but that’s not to say COASSTers aren’t a social bunch. Nancy Karle recruited her mother Barbara Collins.  Tom Hertzig recruited his wife, Connie.  Sarah Swanson and Max Smith got married on their COASST beach.  Issa Parker brings along her grandson Cedar Parker Pavitt.  Gary and Lauren Lester take their Labrador retriever Enzo out to help survey.  For his retirement party, Rainer Wieland invited his family and friends to his monthly COASST survey.  COASST is about science, and about community.  It’s about learning the natural history – the comings and goings, the seasons, the patterns, the species, the power of natural forces.  It’s about documenting rightness, and wrongness, beyond a shadow of a doubt.  And it’s about sharing that knowledge – with scientists, with community members, and with decision-makers. 

 In the last century, science was locked up in the ivory tower, practiced by university professors with PhDs who spoke a language that was important, if difficult for most people to understand.   It’s no wonder students turned away from science and math.  But science matters.  Science can unlock how the world works, and can help solve the problems we face.  In this century, citizens are getting back into the game.  Not as scientists, but as an integral, and essential, part of the science team: the eyes and ears, the data collectors, the natural historians, and the witnesses of how the world is changing.  Citizens and scientists working together is a powerful combination, deep in knowledge, broad in reach, and fiercely committed to the stewardship of the places they know and love.  COASST is not a single person; it’s a village of dedicated staff (5), amazing undergraduate interns (12), and legions of coastal community members (850!!).

I’m proud to be a Champion of Change.  It’s an honor I share with everyone in COASST, because I didn’t do it, we did.

Julia Parish is the Associate Dean of the College of the Environment at the University of Washington.

Open Science for a Changing Planet

Rebecca Moore is being honored as a Champion of Change for the vision she has demonstrated and for her commitment to open science.

In 2008, I was asked by indigenous Amazon Indians in Brazil to come and teach them how to use Google Earth to defend their land from threats like illegal logging.  While I was there a leading geoscientist approached me.  He said that while Google Earth and Maps were great tools for visualizing satellite imagery and map data, they were not optimal for conducting scientific analysis of that data such as mapping trends and monitoring change in places like the Brazilian Amazon. He wondered, would Google consider building such a technology to address the need for monitoring change?

I soon learned that more than a million acres of Brazilian Amazon were disappearing every year, often due to illegal logging in remote parts of the rainforest where law enforcement on the ground was spread thin. From a climate perspective, deforestation is said to account for between 14 and 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. This accounts for more than all the transportation in the world put together (including cars, planes, trucks, ships, etc).

To tackle this problem, freely-available daily satellite imagery could be used as the foundation of an automated alerting system powered by scientific algorithms. However the scale of the data and subsequent data processing required were daunting. To monitor change in the Amazon requires many terabytes of satellite imagery, and the data analysis can take weeks or months to run on a single computer. By then, once deforestation is discovered, it is often too late.

I brought this challenge back to Google headquarters, and we built a new technology platform that we call Google Earth Engine. This analytical engine works for all the world’s satellite and environmental data, both historical and daily-updating. It also has an easy-to-use software framework for scientists to run their algorithms on thousands of computers in parallel in Google’s data centers. With a team of some of the best software engineers at Google, we developed collaborations with government agencies such as NASA, USGS and NOAA to bring their treasure trove of decades of planetary data out of tape vaults (like this.) We put it online, into Google Earth Engine, and made it ready for analysis.

We launched Earth Engine in 2010, and I’m happy to say that now more than a thousand scientists all over the world (e.g., in the United States, Brazil and Australia) are using it for everything from monitoring deforestation to forecasting drought. They are estimating agricultural crop yield and predicting where chimpanzees are likely to build their nests.

In collaboration with scientist Matthew Hansen and CONAFOR, Mexico’s National Forestry Commission, we produced the highest resolution forest and water map of Mexico ever created. The map required 15,000 hours of computation, but was completed in less than a day on Google Earth Engine. We used 1,000 computers and over 53,000 Landsat images.  On a single computer it would have taken almost three years.

We also recently used Google Earth Engine to create a stunning historical perspective on the changes to the Earth’s surface over time. We compiled more than a quarter-century of Landsat images of Earth (millions of images and trillions of pixels) into an interactive time-lapse experience – perhaps the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public.  Now, anyone can view stunning phenomena such as the sprouting of Dubai’s artificial Palm Islands, the retreat of Alaska’s Columbia Glacier, the deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon and urban growth in Las Vegas from 1984 to 2012.

As we continue to develop the platform, we hope more scientists will use the new Earth Engine API to integrate their applications online—for disease mitigation, disaster response, and other beneficial uses. If you’re interested in partnering with us, we want to hear from you—visit our website!  We look forward to seeing what’s possible when scientists, governments, NGO’s, universities, and others gain access to open data and computing resources to collaborate online.  Together we can advance science, inform policy, democratize access to satellite data, and help protect the earth’s environment.

Rebecca Moore is an Engineering Manager at Google.

Reaching for the Stars: Bringing the Cosmos to a Computer Near You

Jeremiah Ostriker is being honored as a Champion of Change for the vision he has demonstrated and for his commitment to open science.

I have been very lucky.

Growing up in a big city where the lights obscured the night sky, I became more and more curious about what was “out there,” above the bustle of urban life, above the US, far above the little speck of dust we call planet Earth. Books on the solar system of planets and on the world of stars that made up our Milky Way galaxy fascinated me. Big telescopes, on the ground and in the good climate of the Western part of our country, were beginning to peer into the wider universe of galaxies and cosmology. Hubble had discovered the expanding universe whose fate was now a serious scientific subject, no longer in the realm of philosophy or theology but a domain where measurement and calculation based on physical laws was possible.

At that time, astronomers applied for time on telescopes, took observations, and then carried the results to their home institutions where they sat in desk drawers until years of slow analysis allowed the results to be published in technical journals. In my first job as a student at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, I sat for months with a mechanical calculator analyzing data (and making mistakes) for a senior astronomer.

Needless to say, all data was proprietary, and competition was fierce. If someone else published results before you did, it was a disaster, so cooperation between groups was unheard of. Science moved – but relatively slowly.

But, starting in the mid-1960s, roughly a half-century ago, revolutionary changes, driven largely by technology, changed the game, and progress accelerated at an extraordinary rate. New electronic detectors were far more efficient, and the information was recorded electronically, making the use of digital computers possible. Astronomy took off.

With a boost from “Moore’s Law” (the increase of computing power by a factor of two every 18 months) we went from bits to megabytes to terabytes in a few decades. Instead of looking at one spot or another on the sky and storing what we saw, we could now survey large areas; we could do it in several colors from the far infrared to the ultraviolet. And, we could do it again and again to see what was changing in the distant universe. The revolution was incredible.

Then telescopes were placed on satellites. The obscuring and blurring effects of our atmosphere were bypassed, and astonishing results could be obtained, regardless of the cloud cover, 24/7. Now we astronomers had leapt off the planet ourselves. Policies on the availability and distribution of the results had to change, and did change in a fashion as revolutionary as the results themselves.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey exemplifies this transition in science. Astronomers, who had experience in cooperating with one another across boundaries since the Renaissance, led the way. It was initiated in conversations in Princeton in the late 1980s with Jim Gunn leading on the technical side and me on the organizational aspects. In the next several years a consortium was established with funds raised from private sources, universities, the Sloan Foundation, and several US government agencies to put a relatively small (2.5m) telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico and repeatedly scan the available sky in a dedicated mode. Over 40 institutions, both US and foreign, have taken active roles in the enterprise. The results have far surpassed the wildest early expectations.

Very early on in the endeavor, Principles of Operation were established that made open to all participants all of the data acquired by any of them – a startling change from most existing astronomical practice. It was further required that all data be archived and made available to the scientific world and to the public within two years after it was initially acquired.

This practice had an extraordinary, and intended, byproduct. It became to the advantage of every participant that instruments and data reduction techniques of the other scientists be maximally effective! Thus, cooperation among the various teams was enthusiastic and effective from the very beginning.

In operation since 2000, SDSS has archived 70 terabytes of data from 1/3 of the celestial sphere including over half a billion galaxies, stars, quasars and asteroids. It has resulted in over 5000 refereed publications that have been cited over 200,000 times. This is a record that tops any previous, ground based astronomical project – astonishing for results of a relatively small telescope - and due in no small part to the “Open Science” character of its charter and operations.

The successor program, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), is in the President’s 2014 budget. A much larger telescope at a superb Chilean site is planned to extend and enhance this policy of open distribution of data, with results that should greatly extend our knowledge and understanding of the universe around us. The story of this half-century revolution of cosmological discovery and comprehension is told in my recent book – “Heart of Darkness: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe.”

I have been lucky indeed to have lived through and participated in this exciting adventure.

Jeremiah Ostriker is a Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University.