International Bird Rescue Research Center

U-Mass Researchers Launch iPhone App to Rescue Oiled Gulf Coast Wildlife

Thanks to researchers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, iPhone users who find oiled birds and other distressed wildlife in the Gulf Coast region can send the location and a photo of the animal instantly to animal rescue networks using a free new iPhone app-MoGO-for Mobile Gulf Observatory. It was developed to make it easier for folks to help wildlife exposed to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The UMass Amherst researchers hope the MoGO app will energize a large network of “citizen scientists” looking for ways to help save wildlife along the 14,000 miles of northern Gulf coastline.

Rescue networks are busy saving wildlife, but the task is enormous and trained staff too few to cover the territory from Louisiana to Florida. In the largest oil spill in U.S. history, over 400 wildlife species and 35 national wildlife refuges are threatened.

“That’s where citizen science comes in,” says UMass Amherst wildlife biologist Curt Griffin. “The new app allows anyone who finds an oiled animal to be linked automatically by the phone to the Wildlife Hotline and also to contribute photos of the stranded animal and its GPS location coordinates to a database here on campus.”

Each report will alert wildlife networks to deploy experts to rescue live animals for clean-up and medical treatment. Photos of oiled wildlife plus the GPS location will also be uploaded to MoGO’s comprehensive database for review by wildlife and fisheries experts using a Web browser. Users are also encouraged to upload their photos of dead marine and coastal wildlife, tar balls on beaches, oil slicks on water and oiled coastal habitats to the MoGO database.

The idea for the new app came to Charlie Schweik, associate director of the National Center for Digital Government, as he listened to yet another depressing story about the Gulf oil spill. Already working on invasive species mapping with computer scientist Deepak Ganesan, an expert in mobile phone and sensor systems, Schweik thought that experience might prove useful for inventorying damage in the Gulf. Smartphones like the iPhone with sensors including camera, GPS, audio and video, can provide valuable data for such an application.

Schweik also turned to Griffin and Andy Danylchuk, a fisheries ecologist, his colleagues in UMass Amherst’s natural resources conservation department, to connect to the wildlife and fisheries community. Griffin and Danylchuk agreed that a mobile phone app in the hands of an army of “citizen scientists” would enhance recovery efforts by wildlife stranding networks. It could also increase the efficiency of state and federal efforts to monitor, assess and respond to the damage caused by the spill and engage the public to partner with natural resources agencies and researchers.

As Danylchuk points out, “The MoGO public database will help guide restoration efforts of vital coastal and marine habitats, and be used by scientists world-wide to assess the ecological impacts of the spill on the Gulf. The public database also allows scientists outside the Gulf region to participate in the assessment.”

The app takes advantage of “mobile crowdsourcing,” that is, the power of smart personal mobile devices to provide thousands of eyes and ears on the ground. Ganesan’s research group has designed a software framework called “mCrowd,” which simplifies the usual weeks- to months-long process of developing a new mobile crowdsourcing app. “It provides easy-to-use templates that can be tailored to a new application,” Ganesan explains. His mCrowd technology allowed the UMass Amherst team to create the MoGO app and infrastructure in a little more than a week.

Success of the project now rests on how well the word gets out to the public in the Gulf region, the researchers note. “Any person, on land or at sea, wishing to use the free app for their iPhone can go to www.savegulfwildlife.org for more information on how to get it on their iPhone,” Schweik says.

So everyone, let your friends in the Gulf know about this great app. You can help conserve the planet, right from your iPhone. The animal you save may be the critical one.