Cellphones and iPods go to the field to help study nature

The ubiquitous gadgets are being used to record frog calls, hoot for owls, and identify plants from Hawaii to the United Kingdom.

Last week, dozens of researchers gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to compare notes on the use of consumer electronics in the study of flora and fauna, a new field they call human-environment mobile-based interactions.

Dale Joachim, a visiting scientist at MIT’s Media Lab, organized the event, with funding from the National Science Foundation.

Cellphones’ computing capacity is great and growing, Joachim said. “How do we rethink human-environment interactions in light of these mobile devices?’’

Carlos Corrada-Bravo, director of the Computer Science Program at the University of Puerto Rico, is using simple consumer devices to monitor bird and frog songs in remote areas of Puerto Rico and Hawaii. His basic system uses an iPod Touch programmed to record at intervals, a battery, and an off-the-shelf microphone paired with a pre-amp built by an undergrad. (The microphone and pre-amp cost less than $20.) Next, Corrada-Bravo hopes to program the iPod to do on-site analysis, reducing the amount of raw data it needs to store.

With mobile phone service growing rapidly, a Media Lab research scientist, Richard Fletcher, is exploring how to use that infrastructure to do better environmental monitoring in the developing world.

Cellphone modems are one strategy, but Fletcher said the cost can be prohibitive because they require many cellphones and SIM cards. Instead, he envisions cheap low-wattage systems incorporating sensors - to detect soil moisture or pH, for example - wired to data-storage hubs with Bluetooth radios. Then a field assistant could ride between the hubs on a bicycle or motorcycle, using a single cellphone to pick up the data via Bluetooth.

Botany, too, is moving well beyond the era of plant presses and dichotomous keys.

Mike Saunders, of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, near London, is developing a plant-identification system using a mash-up of technologies.

As Saunders envisions it, a curious naturalist would use a cellphone to snap a photo of a plant and dial up Kew’s computer system.

The phone’s GPS would note the time and location, narrowing the range of candidate species. Then the Kew system’s image-recognition software would further narrow the range, as would simple questions asked of the user, such as: Is the stem hollow? What color is the flower? To confirm the identification, online user communities could weigh in with expert opinions.

But, Saunders said, plant identification is not the last step in the process. He hopes user-generated data will fill in blanks in biodiversity maps. He expects to have a phone-accessible guide to the flora of the United Kingdom ready within 18 months.

“It’s a matter of putting the technology together in the right way,’’ he said.

Joachim recently collaborated with owl researchers in Connecticut and Maine. They paired cellphones with microphones and speakers and placed them in the woods to both play prerecorded owl calls and record owls’ responses. Joachim coordinated the playback of owl calls from a central server at MIT. The system showed promise, Joachim said, but even with modern technology, some old-fashioned challenges remained - with microphones and speakers nearby, feedback presented a hurdle, for example.

Other researchers spoke of lingering limitations like batteries, bandwidth, and data storage.

And some raised concerns that the monitoring strategies will create new environmental problems by increasing electronic waste in remote areas or providing specific locations to wildlife poachers.

Joachim does not dismiss the challenges, but believes they can be overcome. The recent innovations are leading to a new era of environmental monitoring, he said. In the past, there might have been one camera, monitored by one researcher, and all the information flowed one way. But the new “digital ecology’’ - millions of cellphones that can interact with powerful servers - is changing things rapidly, he said.

“Now we have a different beast,’’ Joachim said. “We have a beast with a thousand eyes.’’