Get the story behind The WildLab from its creators, who used the N95 as part of their award-winning interactive project for birdwatchers and citizen scientists.

The WildLab is a mobile-based platform that enables citizen scientists to report, share and track their observations from the field. A smart implementation of mobile technology to survey the environment, the project recently took the 1st runner-up prize at the 2008 Navteq LBS challenge.

I spoke with creators Jared Lamenzo, Mohit SantRam and Kuan Huang (who form the company Mediated Spaces) to find out more about the project.

Can you describe how The WildLab works? What’s the interaction for the person using it?

The WildLab uses the location-based capabilities of mobile devices to empower citizen scientists’ explorations of the natural world. Citizen science is best represented by birdwatching, or “birding.” The WildLab replaces traditional pen-and-paper bird counts, which are generally tallied by a sponsoring institution, and allows a birder to make real-time updates to their own database of sightings.

With The WildLab, birders enter the common name of a bird and the number of birds sighted; the date, time, latitude and longitude are saved as well. Besides sponsored bird counts, many birders have “birding life lists,” and The WildLab can keep track of that data too.

The WildLab web site is designed to be a place where birders can educate each other, share stories and media and generally enjoy the fellowship for which the birding community is known.

Congratulations on being selected as the 1st runner-up at the Navteq LBS challenge. Now that the project has received recognition and some licensing opportunities, where do you plan to take it?

The verification of the idea at the NAVTEQ Challenge was very important to us, and we got some fantastic feedback from the mobile community. We are now working hard on expanding The WildLab’s technical capabilities (like a location-based species look-ahead feature to ease typing, and access to a bird song database) and partnering with leading institutions that can use the data in environmental studies.

Birds are leading indicators of the health of an ecosystem, and the more eyes looking for and collecting data, the better. It makes a difference not only in the accuracy of the scientific study, but also in the understanding of the environment by the citizen scientist. We are also looking into using The WildLab as a platform for eco-tourism applications and other types of wildlife besides birds.

Has Mediated Spaces worked on previous mobile projects that informed this project?

It started with an astronomy project called The Skymap that maps the heavens for a user’s current location and time on the globe. Incidentally, The Skymap just recently won 1st place in the Spring 2008 WHERE Developer Contest. Birdwatching came to the forefront after we did some beginner-level birdwatching in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and noted how people kept track of their sightings. There had to be a better way.

As technologists, we focus on getting people away from sitting in front of screens, and that’s how we ended up in the mobile space. Technology serves us and enables rich experiences. It is deeply rewarding to see a “rare bird” in the field, or a silent constellation on a clear night. Hopefully, having a convenient way to guide oneself through nature and the universe will spur more people to go outside themselves.

You used an N95 to develop and test The WildLab. How did you take advantage of it for your project?

GPS. The ability to know your location opens up many possibilities. The birder is able to see what others have seen in that same location - this helps beginning birders learn what birds are common to an area, and alerts more experienced birders to something rare. It also allows us to add a map showing the location of birding “HotSpots”, places people choose to go birding, on a map.

We built The WildLab for the WHERE platform, which uses a Java-like scripting language. Eventually, we would like to write a version specific to Nseries using WRT. The N95 performed well in the field; not only did we take advantage of its GPS capabilities, but it took some decent photographs too. It is amazing how far these devices have come - previously, some birders used a separate GPS device with a time-stamp, logged sightings on a separate PDA with bird list software and then synced them later to figure out the locations of their sightings. To be able to do all this on a mobile phone, a device that is just a couple decades old, is just terrific.

Is The WildLab available for download for the general public?

Currently, the application is available in a private beta on uLocate’s where platform; we plan to formally launch in the near future. People who are interested in participating can contact us to try it out.

I saw on your web site that you brought The WildLab to the World Series of Birding. Anything interesting happen there?

Our 19-year-old teammate at the World Series of Birding was a little disappointed in the number of migrants that appeared; that was due to sub-optimal weather conditions. And 5AM was also a bit too early to deal with such a high density of mosquitoes. However, in the span of approximately four hours, we had identified almost 80 species of birds. By the end of the day, we had spotted nearly 100. We had a great time, and learned a lot. The large number of participants in the competition and the patience, dedication and sense of adventure of the birders were inspirational.

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