Acartia

Acartia (https://acartia.io/home) is a browser-based web-app that allows users to geotag marine ecotypes. It also received geotagged data from other sources. It displays geotagged data points on an interactive map.

Acartia is not an Orcasound web-app. We have a collaborative partnership with Acartia volunteers, and it’s been requested that we provide UX work. User research has not been done, and some discovery and usability studies could be run to better understand how to create a user-centric experience for geolocating marine ecotypes in the Salish Sea.

Acartia is a decentralized data cooperative for sharing marine animal locations within the Salish Sea. It is named for one of the smallest animals in Puget Sound -- microscopic copepods -- but was built to recover one of the biggest -- the endangered Southern Resident killer whales.

A demonstration of the democratizing power of Web 3.0 tech, it is capable of aggregating real-time observations from a growing ecosystem of applications and sharing archived observations from decades of monitoring effort.

The current data cooperative was created by TypeHuman as open source code with an open API first utilized by Conserve.io via the Whale Alert and Ocean Alert mobile apps. Initial data providers and beta-testers of mobile and web apps, as well as the cooperative itself, are two open community science networks in Puget Sound: Orca Network and Orcasound. Phase one of the project has been coordinated and funded by Resolve Conservation and Beam Reach.

P.S.: Acartia is a common type of zooplankton, a copepod at the bottom of the Salish Sea food chain that is topped by killer whales. We welcome collaborators interested in monitoring, modeling, and conserving the Salish Sea -- from biological oceanographers to marine biologists to birders to marine mammal stewards. Drop us an email, contribute via our GitHub repository, or sign up to provide or utilize data.

If you would like to volunteer on the Acartia team, please post a message in the Slack channel linked below.

Project brief: Orcasound Partnership: Acartia Project Brief

Slack channel: #ux-acartia

Project folder: PARTNERSHIP WITH ORCASOUND: Acartia

GitHub project: UX Work- Orcasound Affiliation- Acartia