Amazon Aerobotany
Get a bird's eye view of the Amazon rainforest canopy and help monitor the biological rhythms and life cycles of rainforest trees.
The "old school" approach to studying tree demography in the rainforest involves a research team navigating through the dense understorey, and mapping, tagging, identifying and measuring trees – laborious and time-consuming work. The repeated monitoring required for long-term demographic studies can also become expensive over the long term.
What if you could remotely monitor tree demography instead, without even setting foot in the rainforest? That is exactly what we have in mind with the drone-captured high-resolution imagery of the rainforest canopy! A citizen scientist can quickly learn to identify multiple common and important rainforest tree species. Palms, in particular, have very distinct-shaped crowns that are easy to recognize.
We’re starting the demographic element of Amazon Aerobotany by focusing on a common and distinctive palm species that is both ecologically and economically important – Euterpe precatoria, the huasaí palm (Image1 , Image2). Huasaí palms produce tasty and highly nutritious fruits (very similar in appearance and taste to their internationally renowned Brazilian cousin acaí) that are an important food resource for many rainforest animals like monkeys, tapirs and peccaries. In urban areas near the rainforest, huasaí ice-cream and smoothies are a delicious treat!
Como participar
As an Amazon Aerobotanist, you will contribute to valuable long-term phenological and demographic research by scanning high-resolution images of the rainforest canopy captured by a Phantom 4 drone flown over a 400-hectare (4 million square meters, or almost a thousand acres) ecotourism concession located on the fringes of Tambopata National Reserve.
1) Phenology data: We intend to monitor phenology year-round over several years so that we can compare year-to-year patterns and examine the impact of natural and human-induced climatic fluctuations on rainforest tree phenology. We’ll focus on two phenophases that are easy to spot – flowering and leafless tree crowns. All you have to do is spot tree crowns that confirm to one of the two phenophases, and circle them so that we can tally their numbers. We'll fly our drone over the concession every 3-4 weeks, and upload a new set of images each month for you to classify.
2) Demography data: We’ll begin by computing a population estimate of Huasaí palms across the 400-hectare ecotourism concession as the baseline for long-term demographic monitoring. You’ll scan the same images for the distinctive, graceful crowns of adult Huasaí palms and circle them, and we'll tally their numbers. We intend to collect demographic data on multiple focal species that we'll introduce when we upload a new set of images each month for phenological monitoring. Demographic monitoring for each focal species will follow an annual schedule - we'll ask you to scan images for each focal species once a year.
By spending less than a minute per image, you will collect data that would have taken at least a couple of hours the old-fashioned way!
Are you ready to become an Amazon Aerobotanist??