The environmental impacts of Climate Change is one of the main topic under discussion. Phenology is a discipline that has given an important contribute in the evaluation of climate change impacts so much so that an entire section of the IV IPCC Report was based on several phenological studies. Monitoring activities and data collection tools are among the most challenging and resource consuming activities and they could be improved by effectively using WEB 2.0. These kind of tools are more widespread and used in Citizen Science projects that provide powerful tools to facilitate the participation of volunteers without a specific knowledge to monitoring networks. The aim of this study is to describe a prototype for data collection and analyses of phenological observations using a web oriented architecture composed by a Geo Database and an user friendly interface with customized GIS functions for georeferencing data supplied by the internet community . The web architecture as well as the user interface were implemented using Open Source technologies as PHP/Ajax and PostgreSQL for Geo Database management. Moreover several Java procedures were developed to support geostatistical and geospatial analyses. This system provides an opportunity for citizen to learn about the environment and participate in real distributed scientific studies and for the scientific community to easily improve collaboration among research teams involved in large-scale studies.
Could scientific research be improved by applying WEB 2.0 tools as Citizen Science does?
Massetti L;T De Filippis;L Rocchi
2010
Abstract
The environmental impacts of Climate Change is one of the main topic under discussion. Phenology is a discipline that has given an important contribute in the evaluation of climate change impacts so much so that an entire section of the IV IPCC Report was based on several phenological studies. Monitoring activities and data collection tools are among the most challenging and resource consuming activities and they could be improved by effectively using WEB 2.0. These kind of tools are more widespread and used in Citizen Science projects that provide powerful tools to facilitate the participation of volunteers without a specific knowledge to monitoring networks. The aim of this study is to describe a prototype for data collection and analyses of phenological observations using a web oriented architecture composed by a Geo Database and an user friendly interface with customized GIS functions for georeferencing data supplied by the internet community . The web architecture as well as the user interface were implemented using Open Source technologies as PHP/Ajax and PostgreSQL for Geo Database management. Moreover several Java procedures were developed to support geostatistical and geospatial analyses. This system provides an opportunity for citizen to learn about the environment and participate in real distributed scientific studies and for the scientific community to easily improve collaboration among research teams involved in large-scale studies.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
