Data and Meta Data

I am of the firm opinion that explorers should collect data. I am rather generous as to the kinds of data that can be collected; my short answer is anything you want. I am less open minded about the act itself at least when it comes to my self perception as an explorer going an an Expedition. My image of an explorer is so firmly connected to doing field research that my plan from the outset involved data collection (see my Goals under Deliverables)

I work with GLOBE, an international Earth systems, school based, citizen science project so it was a given that I would use their protocols while on Expedition. I had a rather robust list of protocols I wanted to do: clouds , land cover classification, soil color. At the last minute I threw an infra red thermometer into my suitcase to collect surface temperature data.

For various reasons field work did not pan out the way I hoped. This often happens in field work. You think you will go on shore and do all these interesting protocols, and then you find out that you have to stay in tight knit groups because you are in polar bear country. You are on a hike so no time to do lots of protocols at each stop as the rest of the group, including the naturalist, will want to keep moving.

This is how surface temperature ended up being the rock star of my GLOBE protocols. I could do it quickly, I could do it on land and sea, the readings were clear and unambiguous. As the young people say "Boom."

In my personal life am a contributor to iNaturalist, an online community that shares pictures of flora and fauna. My data collection plan included taking photos and uploading them to iNaturalist.

All data needs meta data or data about the data. Where was it taken? When? What were the salient conditions? I had to cobble together a structure for meta data since internet access was spotty. My process was take a picture of the lat/long on the ship's instrumentation, cross reference the lat/long with the time/date stamp of the picture and put it into a spreadsheet with notes.

Meta Data

The meta data for both the GLOBE and iNaturalist data collection is included in a spread sheet. Access the entire sheet or scan below.

GLOBE

Surface Temperature

As I mentioned above, surface temperature was a protocol I was able to do consistently throughout the Expedition. I had some technical difficulties at the beginning in that I wasn't controlling for thermal shock, the impact to the instrument going from inside to outside. Below is the data post thermal shock correction.

Land Cover Classification

The GLOBE MUC Field Guide gives this overview of land cover classification.

MUC stands for Modified UNESCO Classification. It is a land cover classification system developed by the team of researchers at the University of New Hampshire as part of the Land Cover Investigation of The GLOBE Program. As the name implies, the MUC System is a modified version of the global land cover system developed by UNESCO (1973)*. It is a land cover classification system which follows international standards and ecological terminology for the identification of specific land cover classes. In GLOBE, MUC data are used to validate remotely sensed data. MUC is designed to be used anywhere in the world. By using a standard international classification system, all the GLOBE data may be compiled into a single regional or global land cover data set.

The main work of GLOBE's protocol for determining land cover classification is to work your way through a series of questions about the landscape to arrive at a modified UNESCO classification.

The land cover classification was, not surprisingly, tundra. Things got a little tricky because we would stop in areas with vegetation due to the "down wash" of nutrients from nesting birds in cliffs above our stop. I was never certain if the dense mosses with occasional forb was a caespitose or creeping cover. Further complicating matters, go beyond our general area with no nesting birds above and there was no vegetation below. You can see why I called it good with Tundra.

iNaturalist

I became aware of iNaturalist several years ago through National Geographic. Since I am a hiker and paddler, I could see the benefits of this online community to tell a story of flora and fauna.

What kind of story? Allow me an example.

In 2017, I observed and reported tumblebugs found on a bison poop pie near Sage Creek Campground in Badlands National Park. When I looked at the map after uploading the observation, I noticed another in the same vicinity. Oh, cool, I thought. What was it? I clicked on it only to find more tumblebugs, reported two years previously by me.

I checked my other observations. No reports of tumblebugs. From my observations and lack there of, I know a little bit more of the tumblebug story, namely, they are active inlate May around the Sage Creek Campground area. This is not to say they aren't active other times of year and other places. But my data suggests that if you want to see tumblebugs, go to Sage Creek in late May.

I don't know if or when I will return to the Arctic so for all intents and purposes my part in the story is done. I share my observations in hopes they may be of use to someone else in the same way a small historical data set about tumblebugs was useful to me. I curated my Arctic observations into a project.

I owe a big thank you to the book Flowers of Svalbard by Olav Gjoerevoll and Lindblad Expedition naturalist Dennis Cornejo for help with identifications.

Update

The Grosvenor Teacher Fellow Community now has an iNaturalist project of observations made by GTFs on expedition.