Mark Salvatore, an associate professor in NAU’s Department of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences, won a grant from the National Science Foundation to kick off an Antarctic citizen science project.
Working with Lumberjack Ph.D. student Gavin Moriarty, Salvatore will work with ecological researchers in the McMurdo Dry Valleys (MDV) of Antarctica and the crowdsourcing platform Zooniverse to create a citizen science project aimed at measuring environmental change on the continent over the last 70 years. Salvatore said the MDV is one of the most stable landscapes on Earth, and as a result, it’s particularly challenging to study change there.
“Since the 1950s, the U.S. military and the NSF have collected terabytes of aerial photographs over Antarctica for reconnaissance, logistics and scientific purposes,” Salvatore said. “This extensive archive of historical imagery provides a unique opportunity to reconstruct and analyze how cold desert landscapes evolve over decadal to centennial timescales.”
After a short training session, volunteers will be tasked with matching modern satellite images with historical air photos, giving Antarctic researchers a better understanding of how lake level rise, stream evolution and snowfall has changed across the decades. Salvatore said their work could aid researchers for decades to come.
“These contributions will support the creation of a long-term, high-quality dataset and searchable archive that can serve as a foundation for future scientific investigations of Antarctic landscape change,” he said. “In addition to enabling robust data generation, the project emphasizes public engagement through citizen science, open data accessibility and the development of scalable tools that can be applied to similar remote sensing challenges in other polar and remote regions."
Salvatore said citizen scientists should stay tuned for more information about how to get involved.