Courtesy of Jungle Rhythms. Koen Hufkens and colleagues digitized the tables, but quickly realized the marks were simply too faint (image 1). “The notes are basically small pencil lines that overlay a grid on the paper, and the lack of contrast between the two makes it difficult to separate. It needs the human eye to tease them apart,” he said. Image 2 shows what the grid looked like after it was annotated.

The Harvard Gazette’s story on the citizen science project that will put dormant analog data to new use with digital assistance:

Koen Hufkens is trying to solve a scientific mystery, and he’s asking for the public’s help to do it.

Hufkens, a postdoctoral fellow working in the lab of Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Andrew Richardson, this month launched Jungle Rhythms, a citizen-science project that aims to digitize thousands of pages of detailed observations on the life cycles of African trees.

“The question we want to answer is how these forests respond to drought or climate change in general,” Hufkens said. “This data can give us insight into how trees respond to variations in climate … so we should potentially be able to see a signal of how they respond in terms of flowering, in terms of fruiting, and in terms of shedding leaves. This data could also give us some insight into how forests will respond in terms of issues like species composition and carbon cycling, among others.”

The goal of the project, Hufkens said, is to transform a decades-old archive of written observations into a searchable database that captures the ebb and flow of the forest.

“The data itself is quite extraordinary,” Hufkens said. “It runs for roughly 20 years, with tables that summarized notebooks that had detailed, often weekly, observations. In total, there are roughly 2,000 individual trees. Especially given the age and the rigor with which it was conducted, it’s pretty special.”

Another mystery lies in exactly why the information was collected in the first place.

What is known, Hufkens said, is that a group of Belgian scientists were stationed at the Yangambi Research Station in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1938 to 1958 as part of an agriculture-based research project, and that the group began collecting observations on the life cycles of local trees. The observations were kept in a series of notebooks, and later summarized in large tables, which were stored in an archive under less-than-ideal conditions.

Hufkens and colleagues digitized the tables in the hopes of using computers to automatically capture the data, but quickly realized the marks were simply too faint…

Read the whole story here.