Turtle Sense: An open software and hardware citizen science project to monitor sea turtle nests

A common implementation of a Citizen Science project has a team of experts create a platform that is disseminated to citizens who collect and sometimes analyze data. If the platform is software, it is often distributed... [ view full abstract ]

A common implementation of a Citizen Science project has a team of experts create a platform that is disseminated to citizens who collect and sometimes analyze data. If the platform is software, it is often distributed electronically, as with a phone app. A software platform may be open source, created by programmers volunteering their time. Projects that require open source hardware created by volunteers -- like custom electronics -- are more challenging as they require the additional investment of money and materials, and must be physically fabricated and transported. Funds must be found to pay for the cost of hardware development. Relationships need to be forged with non-profit and government institution partners. Trustworthy and reliable volunteers must be found and integrated into the project. These factors make open hardware projects much more difficult to run with a Citizen Science model.

To address these challenges, we created an on-line network, NerdsWithoutBorders.net, to attract and manage technically skilled volunteers to work on environmental and other real-world problems. Our first project, Turtle Sense, is based on both open software and hardware, coordinating the skills of biologists, electrical engineers, and computer scientists to design, build and deploy remote sensors that monitor motion and temperature in sea turtle nests with a goal of predicting hatching. The technology was developed by a small team of volunteers around the country working in partnership with the National Park Service and non-profit institutions in North Carolina. In our model, citizens are not only collecting and analyzing data, they designed, built and deployed data acquisition systems. Experience with our first project will help us design a replicable system that handles the challenges of open hardware projects.