Crawling the Web to Foretell Ecosystem Collapse | Wired Scien...

he Interwebs could become an early warning system for when the web of life is about to fray.

By trawling scientific list-serves, Chinese fish market websites, and local news sources, ecologists think they can use human beings as sensors by mining their communications.

"If we look at coral reefs, for example, the Internet may contain information that describes not only changes in the ecosystem, but also drivers of change, such as global seafood markets," said Tim Daw, an ecologist at the UK's University of East Anglia in a press release about his team's new paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

The six billion people on Earth are changing the biosphere so quickly that traditional ecological methods can't keep up. Humans, though, are acute observers of their environments and bodies, so scientists are combing through the text and numbers on the Internet in hopes of extracting otherwise unavailable or expensive information. It's more crowd mining than crowd sourcing.

Much of the pioneering work in this type of Internet surveillance has come in the public health field, tracking disease. Google Flu Trends, which uses a cloud of keywords to determine how sick a population is, tracks epidemiological data from the Centers for Disease Control. Less serious projects — like this map of a United Kingdom snowstorm based on Tweets about snow — have also had some success tracking the real world.

Highlighted by ignitesrini

These research efforts seem to indicate that people are good sensors, but pulling the information from what they post in human-readable formats and transforming it into quantitative models of the world is tough. The Global Public Health Intelligence Network has developed an epidemic warning system that pulls in data from news wires, web sites, and public health mailing lists. The GPHIN, which is probably the most advanced and uses highly variegated information, only picks up on about 40 percent of the 200 to 250 outbreaks that the World Health Organization investigates each year.

Highlighted by ignitesrini

Highlighted by TransTracker

The Interwebs could become an early warning system for when the web of life is about to fray.

By trawling scientific list-serves, Chinese fish market websites, and local news sources, ecologists think they can use human beings as sensors by mining their communications.

Highlighted by TransTracker

The Interwebs could become an early warning system for when the web of life is about to fray.

By trawling scientific list-serves, Chinese fish market websites, and local news sources, ecologists think they can use human beings as sensors by mining their communications.

Highlighted by chrishp

The six billion people on Earth are changing the biosphere so quickly that traditional ecological methods can't keep up. Humans, though, are acute observers of their environments and bodies, so scientists are combing through the text and numbers on the Internet in hopes of extracting otherwise unavailable or expensive information. It's more crowd mining than crowd sourcing.

Highlighted by TransTracker

scientists are combing through the text and numbers on the Internet in hopes of extracting otherwise unavailable or expensive information. It's more crowd mining than crowd sourcing.

Highlighted by chrishp

Much of the pioneering work in this type of Internet surveillance has come in the public health field, tracking disease.

Highlighted by TransTracker

These research efforts seem to indicate that people are good sensors, but pulling the information from what they post in human-readable formats and transforming it into quantitative models of the world is tough. The Global Public Health Intelligence Network has developed an epidemic warning system that pulls in data from news wires, web sites, and public health mailing lists. The GPHIN, which is probably the most advanced and uses highly variegated information, only picks up on about 40 percent of the 200 to 250 outbreaks that the World Health Organization investigates each year.

Highlighted by chrishp

By looking at human data, not just fisheries and ecological readings, they think they'll be able to detect ecosystem tipping points  before they happen.

Highlighted by chrishp

"Web crawlers can collect information on the drivers of ecosystem change, rather than the resultant ecological responses," they write. "For example, if rapidly emerging markets for high value species are known to be socio-economic drivers which lead to overexploitation and collapse of a fishery, web crawlers can be designed to collect information on rapid changes in prices, landings or investments."

But right now, their plans remain theoretical, and while scraping data seems easy enough, turning it into knowledge is another story. John Brownstein, a Harvard bioinformaticist and co-founder of HealthMap, which does for disease what Daw wants to do for ecology, said that applying the framework to ecology could work.

Highlighted by chrishp