Data Linking and integration - Tracking Herd Movement of Yellowstone National Park Bison

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Challenge Overview

"There's a buffalo in the road!" - SMS and Twitter messages of thousands of visitors per year.

 

Every year, visitors to the United States Yellowstone National Park take millions of digital photos of the herds of wild American Bison. Visitors also post their (surprised!) sightings to Twitter, Facebook, Flikr, etc. And, in addition, lots of park Rangers do the same and upload reports on herd movement. Together, these photographs and other data could provide an incredibly useful resource to researchers - imagine a web dashboard that could be filtered by day, season, herd size, etc, that showed on a map where each observation was made, and what it said. A tool of this kind would allow researchers to identify both a herd and individuals, its movement, health and status. And it could be as easily applied to wolf pack migration (another hot need for wildlife researchers).

 

And this would be especially if one could use the meta-data embedded in images, such as GPS and time stamps - or data that can be dervied from scene/background analysis of terrain, vegetation, and/or weather.  

 

In this idea generation contest, we would like to know what methods, open source tools & algorithms, and even procedures could be used to merge this structured and unstructured data and pin-point it on a map (giving date, time, and whatever else can be gleaned).

 

The awards for this contest are:

  • 1st place: $2000
  • 2nd place: $1000
  • 3rd place: $1000
  • At least 10 $25 Amazon Gift Cards will also be awarded

 



Final Submission Guidelines

This is an Idea Generation Contest
 

The Task

We are interested in brainstorming methods for precisely locating a herd of bison in time by tying photos to specific digital maps with a reasonably high degree of accuracy,  using background to reconstruct the precise location of a specific bison in time.  We recognize that there is significant fission and fusion of herd structure but that is why this is interesting.  Ultimately we want to track the movement of the herds over time and terrain by creating a dynamic set of overlapping territorial domains maps for each of the bison herds.    What algorithms, methods, open source tools and procedures could be used to accomplish our end goals?

 

 

More Detail
Open Source tools such as street map (http://www.openstreetmap.org/) or WebtoMap http://webtomap.com/ and/or MapVisio http://www.mapvisio.com, could be useful platforms for integration.  These digital photos are posted on many social media sites such as Twitter, instagram, Facebook, and Flickr.  Researchers and others are very interested in methods for merging data such as the kind found on these sites via media composite sites, as well as from ranger field reports, resulting in a seamless dashboard-like tools.   The goal isn't to screen-scrape data (you can assume the data is collected through other means) but to integrate it into an accurate pin-pointing of herd data points on a map over time.
 
Submissions
 
In this contest, we are seeking ideas.  There is no specific submission format required, but submissions will be reviewed on Macs and on Windows.  If your submission cannot be easily reviewed it may not be selected for awards.  To make sure your idea can be plainly understood, we recommend you:
  • Include a text description, in .doc(x), .pdf, .txt, or other common text format.
  • Include graphics and other visuals if they support your idea
  • Create "flat" versions of any diagramming tools you use - no special software should be needed to review your idea

Other Submission Guidelines:

  • No stock photography
  • All artwork must be your own
  • Include references to any 3rd party concept, open source software, etc, that you include in your idea (URLs are fine)
  • You must not plagiarize - it is permitted to refer to an existing solution, in whole or part, but you must credit the creators and cannot present it as your own work or idea
  • Do not include obscene language, visuals or other material as doing so will disqualify your submission
  • Up to 5 unique ideas per submitter are allowed (to submit more than one idea, bundle them into a Zip archive, and submit as one submission)
  • Only your last submission will be reviewed, all previous will be ignored
 
Prizes
 

The winners for this contest will be selected by the client according to subjective review.  In order to be considered for award, any submitted ideas should include, at a minimum, methods for merging unstructured data as described above in order to pin-point it on a graphical map.  The awards are:

  • 1st place: $2000
  • 2nd place: $1000
  • 3rd place: $1000
  • At least 10 $25 Amazon Gift Cards will be awarded to:
    • Submitters of the first 5 credible and non-trivial submissions
    • At least 5 additional submitters of runner-up ideas
    • One gift card per submitter

 

The United States Government is funding the prizes for this challenge.

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