I've had a brainwave and I wanted to record it here.
The Idea
Alright so the idea is for an app that has three components.
The first view in the app (and the place folks would start) is a phenophase view. Basically for the current time period (week or month) there'd be a list of "events" likely occurring near the user - things like flowering trees, migrating birds, fruiting fungi, etc. This data would get pulled from the National Phenology Network (NPN) or something similar.
Upon clicking on one of the phenophase + taxa pairs from the first view folks would be taken to a "where" view. This would simply be a map showing them where occurrences of those taxa have been found in the past. This data would come from iNaturalist or something similar.
Finally there'd be a context and cues view that would give folks information on what to look for and where to look for it (think habitat cues) as well as additional information on the taxa. Wonderfully much of this information is in wikipedia!
Okay so those are the views provided by the app. Why do I think this is so cool? Let's dig in.
For the User
A Guide
If you go to a new town for the first time and try to explore it without a guide you're basically leaving things up to chance. The restaurant you decide to go to may be an absolute dud, you may completely miss an amazing section of town, and you might not realize the right time of day to be in a particular area. This is why guides are so darn useful. The important thing is that they tie together time and place and give you the cues you need to find what you're looking for.
The field is an absolutely wonderful "town" in this analogy, bustling with all sorts of wonders. But it's also sprawling and huge and what you get out of it is very, very dependent on when you happen to show up. Show up at the wrong time and you'll miss the migratory birds. Show up at the wrong time and you'll miss the magnolias flowering. So time is super important. Most guides to the field don't include this dimension at all. So by starting with the time dimension we immediately provide value by increasing the odds that when you do go into the field you'll get to see something awesome - we're actually providing a real guide to what can be seen.
The other two views give us the other necessary components for a good guide. First the guide needs to tell you where to go but given nature doesn't have an address we instead need to be able to inform people of the general areas they can go looking for things. The map view gives us this and allows folks the flexibility to pick a spot that suites them.
Once they're there, they'll need the context cues required to actually zone in on what they came to see - thus the third view. But what's absolutely wonderful is that we can provide that context more or less free form because people are already focused in on a specific taxa. In other words we can go into far more depth that a typical field guide can because we know this is what the person wants to focus on.
So all in all we've got a pretty great guide for getting out and about in the field and seeing cool stuff.
A Dynamic Playbill
The next awesome set of features is the dynamism of this guide. Because it's time specific, as the weeks and months pass the "playbill" will change and so there'll always be something new an interesting to go see. Anything static quickly floats out of people's brains, but something that's always changing has a better chance of keeping their attention.
Then there's the fact that given we're tying into things like wikipedia, iNaturalist, and the NPN this stuff is just nation wide right out the gate! If you go to a different state for work or pleasure you can still pull this thing up and find some cool things to go and see!
Clear Objectives
If you were to sit down day one in your calculus class and the teacher just tried to shove every concept in your brain all at once you'd end up feeling overwhelmed, stupid, lost, and probably more than a little bit angry. Yet this is exactly what most field guides and field guide apps are like today! You take them with you outside and then just get hit by the 100s of species and 1000s of specimens you don't yet know how to identify or even organize in your brain!
By focusing on specific phenophase+taxa pairs people will have clear objectives for what they want to see, what they're looking for, and what clues and cues to follow. And by having this lineup change throughout the year they'll be moving through different taxa one step at a time. As a result they'll still end up building knowledge of the various entities within the world around them, but instead of getting hit by it all at once, they can add things in layer by layer.
Finally many species are hard to identify at the wrong time of year and this can lead to considerable frustration on the part of the amateur. By having people go out at interesting times during a taxa's phenology, identification will be far easier and the cues and clues needed far less overwhelming.
All in all this'll make things far more bite sized and approachable.
For the Developer
Incremental Value
Field guides are typically very onerous to put together because they more or less require completeness. If you want a field guide of trees you need to know about most if not all of the trees for that guide to be useful. In our case however this is turned on its head. Because we're focused on phenophase+taxa pairs when someone adds but a single pairing, we have something new and immediately valuable for people to go check out. This is an amazing feature because it opens us up for crowdsourcing. If someone is interested in just one taxa group and wants to add stuff for just that (and only the ones in their area) that's great! We can immediately use whatever they produce because we're not chasing completeness.
Just the Links
In a similar vein, because we're taking advantage of applications that already exist (NPN, iNaturalist, and Wikipedia) there's no need for us to host any data or curate anything at all. All we've gotta do is present things nicely and link them together. On the one hand this makes the life of the app developer much easier but it also means that the means to contribute to the content have already been worked out.
Instantly National
I already mentioned this but wanted to mention it here as well as it's just as valuable to the development. By using such tools as NPN, Wikipedia, and iNaturalist we get national data right out the gate. There's no need to build out separate apps for different regions, or curate data for different places, it's all already there!
For the Environment
This I think is the coolest part. If people actually engage with this application and use it regularly we'll end up building a cohort of people who are familiar with what's in their backyard not just as species but as individuals with life histories of their own. By getting to follow the various taxa through their life stages throughout the year, folks will be able to see them for the living, breathing neighbors that they are. In addition, by being able to direct people's attention to a few taxa at a time, we'll be able to give them a far great depth of context and thus increase the level of wonder associated with each species. This is exactly the kind outreach I believe we need in order to create a caring, understanding public.
And as a plus they'll be introduced to the citizen science community and can see first hand how vibrant that community is as well as the gaps that still need filling (which they can help fill if they feel so inclined).
Conclusion
All in all I'm really hyped about this idea. It's super easy to build, immediately national, perfectly setup for crowdsourcing, makes use of every new increment of information, connects people to the citizen science world, and, most importantly, gives people the guide they need to explore the wonder that is their local biosphere.
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