2024-08-20
This is PMA's DBGI daily open-notebook.
Today is 2024.08.20
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Have a look at the DBGI discussion forum
- https://github.com/orgs/digital-botanical-gardens-initiative/discussions
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Every living organism on Earth synthesises a vast array of chemical compounds! That's chemodiversity in a nutshell. It's the chemical tapestry woven by living organisms, from the building blocks of life to specialised molecules with unique functions. Understanding chemodiversity is crucial for appreciating biodiversity and its impact on human well-being. Despite its significance, knowledge of chemodiversity is concentrated among a select few research communities, and the general public has a limited and often distorted understanding of the topic. At the Earth Metabolome Initiative (EMI), we are building a knowledge base of chemodiversity and utilising computational methods to bridge gaps in our understanding of life sciences. This Agora project will combine the strengths of expert researchers, skilled citizen science and communication specialists, and engaged citizens to explore the depths of local chemodiversity. By employing a multifaceted communication strategy, we aim to engage citizens with a general interest in biodiversity, facilitate their direct interaction with experts, improve their knowledge and foster collaborative discovery, by involving them in research project design and implementation, thus indirectly shaping potential research questions in the field of chemodiversity. We will utilise the established online social network of iNaturalist – known for its citizen science focus on biodiversity – and OneZoom.org tree of life to create interactive web design elements. The physical spaces of botanical gardens in Neuchâtel and Fribourg will serve as interactive hubs. Commencing with Switzerland's multicultural population, roughly a quarter of whom are non-Swiss nationals, we aim to extend this project’s reach internationally by building upon the collective expertise of citizen scientists. This project is novel in its application of proven science communication strategies, like citizen science and interactive web elements, to address the undercommunicated field of chemodiversity. We propose to integrate citizen scientists' knowledge of location, landscape, and habitat of rare or under-documented organisms to streamline sample collection and analysis. This valuable information will be incorporated into the evolving knowledge graph of the EMI.
Contact email to the iNat team for the Agora project.
Dear Tony,
We reach out to you to discuss possibilities of collaboration in the frame of a Citizen and Science Communication project we are setting up and asking funding for at the Swiss Agora SNSF call (https://www.snf.ch/en/JnT2xEAERCgO8qQc/funding/science-communication/agora). We understand that the deadline is short but wanted nevertheless to give it a try and anyway wanted to initiate contact with you guys.
Some background: we are researchers for the Universities of Fribourg and Neuchatel in Switzerland and have initiated recently the Earth Metabolome Initiative. This ambitious projects aims to characterize and document the metabolome (the ensemble of small molecules) across all of Earth's species with no taxonomical focus. You can learn a bit more about our project at https://www.earthmetabolome.org around which we have for now federated over 70 researchers across the world https://www.earthmetabolome.org/people/. Some posts at https://www.linkedin.com/company/earth-metabolome-initiative
In this context we are setting up a Citizen and Science Communication project that aims to engage citizens with a general interest in biodiversity, facilitate their direct interaction with experts, improve their knowledge and foster collaborative discovery, by involving them in research project design and implementation, thus indirectly shaping potential research questions in the field of chemodiversity. The main idea is to build a "treasure quest" and incentive citizens to observe the "next most important" organisms to observe and characterize in the frame of the EMI. Indeed we have over 2.5 millions species to profile and hence need to implement prioritization mechanisms. A first criteria would be to have the widest phylogenetic coverage as possible. For example if we are at the kingdom level at the moment fungi would be the next most important organism to sample. Citizen would be aware of these criteria and the observation answering these criteria combined to other (e.g. geographical proximity) would tag the next organism to be collected in the frame of EMI. Then we dive a taxa level deeper and pursue ... We will utilise the established online social network of iNaturalist – known for its citizen science focus on biodiversity – and OneZoom.org tree of life to create interactive web design elements. At the moment we have the OneZoom (https://www.onezoom.org/) people onboard with the objective to enhance their current interface and start connecting with the chemodiversity data sources (e.g. Wikidata) We also want to build a mirror of the OneZoom tree which would allow to navigate molecules and on each leaf (corresponding to a molecules) link the related biological organism producing such compounds. Overall the idea is also to raise the publics attention to chemodiversity which is a largely overlooked aspect of biodiversity.
In the case you would be willing to join us on this call we would have a possibilty to reserve some modest fundings (in the range of 10-30000 CHF) depending on your implication. We would be notably interested in developping apps that would directly connect to the iNat API and allow user of the EMI Portal and or OneZoom to directly push (under their iNat username) their own contribs. We believe that such project could be a great way to explore possible synergies with iNat and we would be happy to discuss this with you.
Here is a current draft of the proposal (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-fCRjWkNsOOSFty9XwrMTFVLbho4nSSp/edit - Work in progress).
We are aware that the deadline is short (17th September) but we would be happy to discuss this at the soonest with you and see if we can make it happen.
We have also send this message to Carrie Seltzer and Ken-ichi Ueda via the iNat messaging platform). Please let ius know if they are other contacts we should reach out to nad eventually share us their emails. In case you would be interested to discuss this further we would be happy to set up a meeting with you and your team.
Please contact me pierre-marie.allard@unifr.ch and my colleagues Disha Tandon (disha.tandon@unine.ch) and Emmanuel Defossez (emmanuel.defossez@unine.ch)
Best regards,
Pierre-Marie