Post provided by Andrea Kölzsch.

I am a movement ecologist and have until recently worked as a PostDoc at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Radolfzell, Germany. My research focusses, on the one hand, on the tracking of waterbird movement, but in a more general capacity on the empowering of ecologists to gain knowledge from complex data.

The background story of our presently published article began several years back when requests from colleagues and collaborators for help with analysing GPS and other tracking data had started to become overwhelming. Our group leader at the time (and still), Kamran Safi, had the brilliant idea to design an online platform where people with tracking data could interactively analyse their data themselves, with tools that we and others would share on the platform for general use.

With the help of professional computer scientists, my colleague Anne Scharf and I, went ahead. A state-of-the-art, not to say ‘super fancy’ system was developed: MoveApps was born. With an initial set of analysis modules (called Apps) that we developed, it allows data download, analysis and generation of nice, simple plots just by clicking together modules. All of our colleagues could have done the same by programming it themselves in a few lines of code, but in MoveApps, people without coding experience can finally use it for analysis of their data without our direct help!

The community of data owners seems to like using MoveApps for gaining an overview of their tracking data or more complex analyses of movement, behaviour and habitat use. Even real-time applications have become feasible in MoveApps and these applications are especially important in conservation issues, where timely recognition of, for example, disease or mortality of tagged animals is crucial for the ability to intervene in the field quickly.

However, gaining the interest and commitment of the community of code developers for MoveApps has not been as straight forward. The dedication and engagement of volunteer App developers was, and is crucial for the sustainable use of the MoveApps platform.

Coincidentally, during the first years of MoveApps, a real-time use case with African vultures gained us attention in the conservation technology community and AI2’s EarthRanger named MoveApps as a grantee of the Conservation Technology Award 2022. With this grant and additional funding from the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, we were able to actively trigger the formation of a first volunteer App developer community.

With the motivation to make a difference in African wildlife conservation, we posed crucial conservation issues in the EMAC23 coding challenge “Equip MoveApps for Conservation”: detection of non-moving animals, extraction of areas that animals use throughout their day, extraction of movement corridors and the interaction with human infrastructure. Participants were asked to develop creative App code contributing to those conservation challenges and integrate them in the MoveApps platform.

The ideas for this paper were developed during the follow-up EMAC23 Workshop, where we invited participants of the coding challenge to our institute. It was especially interesting to see the varying backgrounds of the people, both professional (ranging from PhD student to banker) and nationality (Cambodia to Canada). But all of us agreed on strong motivation for wildlife conservation and that we want to use our abilities to support the improvement of wildlife and nature conservation.

Thanking all participants for the highly motivating and pleasant experience, I want to point out that the workshop has not only led to the availability of new tools, but also to a deeper understanding of volunteer motivation and idealism. One part of the Workshop was a presentation of our colleague Wolfgang Fiedler about white stork mortality during their migratory travels from Europe to Africa and how some of the Apps contributed during the challenge have helped him in his daily work. This direct application appears to be one of the main motivations to continue voluntary code development.

Another surprising insight was that the volunteers extremely valued our feedback on the functionality of their developed tools. This is akin to how we scientists are grateful for the comments of reviewers and editors to our manuscripts and papers, but seems more emotional and personal for citizen scientists. One participant even named the day that he had received our feedback on his developed App ‘one of his best days’.

During the workshop, we set up a framework that has helped us and might help others in not only establishing motivation, but also in sustaining enthusiasm within the volunteer coding community: for example, know the channels that the volunteers communicate in and address them there, enable open source code and tool availability and explain in much detail and with background information for which use cases help/tools are needed. Specifying all stakeholders and empowering the independent exchange between the different communities by our MoveApps user forum has helped to address some of the framework parts and has enabled the MoveApps effort to become more and more self-organised.

All these insights have improved the MoveApps platform and the ease with which code developers can become involved. Still, in busy times like this, we are struggling to engage a large and dynamic coding community. If you want to help make a difference and become involved, have a look at our website or contact us!

Read the full article here.

Post edited by Sthandiwe Nomthandazo Kanyile.