National Park Service Climate Change Response Program Grant for Picture Post Partnership and Responsive Website Improvements

Picture Post is a part of the Digital Earth Watch (DEW) network. The DEW supports environmental monitoring by citizens, students, and community organizations through digital photography and satellite imagery. Picture Post is affiliated with the University of New Hampshire. Picture Post provides an online location for citizens and organizations to host pictures taken from registered picture posts. The resulting photographic library can be used by university and other scientists, educators, and the public to track phenological, seasonal, and other changes in the photographed landscape. Picture Post is looking to expand their network of posts and improve their visitors’ experiences, especially for first-time users.

The National Park Service Climate Change Response Program is developing a series of wayside exhibits that feature messages about phenology in parks and encourage citizen scientists to aid in the tracking of phenological change on the ground (through photographs). Several national parks already have registered picture posts, and other parks are looking for ways to gather and share citizen science photographs to document climate change.

A partnership with Picture Post will create opportunities for visitors to engage in meaningful research while in the park and to stay engaged with the ongoing research through viewing other’s photos after they return home. Researchers will be able to use the photos through access to the online picture sets on Picture Post’s website. These photos could be useful to researchers both as individual data points in phenological or other climate and environmental change research and as ground truthing tools in satellite imagery studies.

Purpose:

This project will invite visitors to climate change wayside exhibits in national parks to participate in climate change phenology. The project will improve access to and experience with the mobile application ‘Picture Post’ designed to promote citizen science opportunities for the public. It will increase climate change science literacy with the public and empower and engage youth and others to participate in science conservation. This will be accomplished by creating a responsive design that enables the public to access the site through both desktop and mobile devices, and by reviewing and making changes to the existing user interface of the site, thus making it easier for users to contribute pictures to Picture Post. Data generated from the posts will increase the quality and quantity of information available to researchers to better understand phenological change and the impacts of climate change in national parks. The UNH and Picture Post program will benefit by the improvement of the website and by promoting the concept of photo storage to contribute to phenological research in national parks across the country.

Objectives:

1. Redesign the Picture Post website (http://picturepost.unh.edu) home page, post pages, and pages associated with the photo uploads to be mobile-responsive so users can access the site from smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers.
2. Increase the ease of use of the Picture Post website by making each step in the process of locating sites and loading photos clear for first-time users, while maintaining tools for repeat users like access to the IOS app, the greenness index, satellite image of the day, and the tool for uploading multiple sets of photos.
3. Expand the Picture Post program to include posts at Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska; Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee; Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks in California; Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens and Rock Creek Park in Washington DC, and Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Virginia.