Citizen Science Observation Platform - Using Curated Twitter and GeoRSS Enabled Feeds

This project leveraged existing efforts toward the use of social media systems for delivery of information into a web based visualization framework. Rather than support the development of an expensive system developed in-house, this project supports the use of cloud-based social media system Twitter to provide a robust observation platform. Development efforts were directed at utilizing the substantial Twitter API feature set to query the media stream for species observation submissions. Citizen science participants were encouraged to use the Twitter direct message system to submit species observations using a pre-defined schema. Observations were extracted from the Twitter stream and processed using geospatial, chart and timeline [...]