Monitor environmental and social change using IPhones, Photo-stitching, and Time Lapse
Channel: Sam Droege
Date: 2013-05-22

On the ground impacts of Global Climate change, sea level rise, changes to our forests and landscapes, development, all can be measured with precise scientific instruments.  But the money and time to do so is often just not there and thus major changes around us are happening but remain undocumented. However, a partial solution is at hand by simply taking pictures over time from the same location.  Combine those pictures into a sequence and you directly and permanently document and demonstrate change, and these changes can then be quantified.  

This video is a short pitch video about a concept to crowdsource  changes in the environments where we live, work, play, or care about .... be they parks, our backyards, our rivers, or our city scape, using nothing more than camera phones.  The new thing here is that multiple people with multiple cameras can take pictures....the pictures are then processed using existing software so that no matter what camera type or format the pictures were originally they are transformed into uniform snapshots of the same scene, they have the same dimensions with all the objects in the pictures the same size and shape....this allows all the different pictures to be put into time lapse sequences that can be made into a video, a slideshow, or used to measure change directly....over days, years, or decades.

People can do this right now using existing materials at single sites or they can organize networks of camera stations at scales of parks, cities, watersheds, counties, states, countries, or the world.

This is a presentation of an idea.  Anyone can modify this in any way they like and implement it at any scale.  No copyrights.  No permissions needed. Just Do It.

For more technical details on doing the picture rectification see our video at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2pEKjw3Idk

Possible places/groups to implement:  Watershed societies, Riverkeepers, Stream crossings, trail clubs, stream monitoring groups; coastal beaches, dunes, marshes; lichen plots, restorations sites, forestry sites, parks, refuges, new developments, your backyard, construction of a building, the greenup in spring and the leaf drop in the fall of forests and so forth

A conversation about implementing thesed things has started at:
monitorchange.org
You can sign up there to be on the email discussions.


Many thanks to the people who helped develop this idea, including, but not limited to:
Kamren Jefferson, Justin Cuthbertson, Rik Littlefield, Wren Droege, Ky Wildermuth, Wayne Boo